"The horrors really are your America, Mr Bush"

[tenshi816]

I found this in the News Review section of the UK Sunday Times today and had to do a double take when I realized it was written by Andrew Sullivan. Did I miss something? Did Sullivan come into the light at some point and I missed it?

‘This is not America.” Those words were President George W Bush’s attempt to explain the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison on the Arabic-language network Alhurra in 2004. He spoke the words as if they were an empirical matter, but a cognitive dissonance could be sensed through them.

If the men and women who tortured and abused and murdered at Abu Ghraib did not represent America, what did they represent? They wore the uniforms of the United States military. They were under the command of the American military. In the grotesque, grinning photographs they clearly seemed to believe that what they were doing was routine and approved.

And we now know from the official record that Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, had personally authorised the use of unmuzzled dogs to terrify detainees long before Abu Ghraib occurred, exactly as we saw in those photos. Does the secretary of defence not represent America?

Almost two years after the torture story broke Congress finally roused itself and passed an amendment to a defence appropriations bill by John McCain that forbade the use of any “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” of detainees by any American official anywhere in the world. It was passed by veto-proof margins and Bush signed it. But he appended a “signing statement” insisting that, as commander-in-chief, he retained the right to order torture if he saw fit.

More at link: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,2766-2209636,00.html

[Olney Blue]

1. Very good piece. Thanks for posting.

[Minnesota_Lib]

2. Andrew S. must have skipped his daily dose of koolade. K & R

[hatrack]

3. Little late, Bareback Andy

You still owe us, asshole. You'll owe us for the rest of your pathetic nattering Beltway life.