Bulletins from the Ministry for Torture (= the Bush Junta's DoJ)

[L. Coyote]

Bulletins from the Ministry for Torture
Scott Horton - Jan 27, 2008 - http://harpers.org/archive/2008/01/hbc-90002251


Harry Reid made a stirring appeal on Friday. Bush, he said, should use his State of the Union Address to renounce torture and all its works and put an end to policies that have brought disgrace and infamy upon the country:

      As we await President Bush’s final State of the Union address Monday night we know one thing for sure: 
      that cherished faith in America has been greatly diminished and with it, our ability to respond to the 
      critical challenges that threaten our security. 158,000 young Americans rise each morning in the deserts 
      of Iraq to face another day of risk they cannot predict and hatred they did not create. Osama Bin Laden 
      remains free and the Al Qaeda network grows stronger. Afghanistan, once hailed as a great success, continues 
      to backslide into violence, extremism, and a rampant drug trade. The path toward democracy in Pakistan wavers, 
      with billions of American anti-terrorism dollars unaccounted.

      And the moral authority of our great nation has suffered grave damage .....

Bush may very well say that “we do not torture.” He said it in the teeth of the photographs from Abu Ghraib, the gruesome scenes of Guantánamo, the deaths in Bagram and the scandalous reports from the system of CIA blacksites. It is one of Bush’s most practiced, most artfully delivered and least believed lies. But we know he is wedded to torture. It is, for the Bush years, the surest evidence of the morally corrosive wielding of power for the sake of power, of power untamed by accountability, of power placed beyond the hold of Law.

The firmest proof of Bush’s commitment to the idol torture can be found in his defacing of the Department of Justice. At length, of course, this agency has not the remotest relationship to justice. So let’s call it by a name that better reflects the purpose to which its has been converted. Now it’s the Ministry for Torture.

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[L. Coyote]

1. visibility kick

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[L. Coyote]

2. Rather right on predictioin of yesterday's hearing.

[L. Coyote]

5. Good READ kick