One of the saddest outcomes of the Bush/Cheney War on
Dick Cheney and his ghoulish assistant, David Addington (the two premier chickenhawks of the last administration) brought that mindset to the entire Federal government. If a huge majority of the American people disagreed with what they did, their reaction was "So?". Torture is illegal? So what, they just got some mouthpieces to sign opinion letters saying that torture was not torture.
Very few countries hold their war criminals accountable. Normally it takes massive regime change or a peaceful change of power tantamount to a revolution, as in South Africa. Usually the accountability has to come from the outside, with other nations indicting and convicting the war criminals. We have done the same, witness the conviction of Chuckie Taylor on charges of torture. But we will not do the same for our own torturers, not unless the fix is in and our government can be assured that nobody higher than an E-5 or GS-4 will be tried for it.
No, we are no different from the other nations that have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. We are no different from Burma, Chile, Argentina, Peru, China, Cambodia, Russia, or any of the other slew of nations in the last few decades which tortured people and then tried to sweep it under the rug forever.
So much for "the rule of law".
And so much for "change you can believe in".
(H/T)
2 comments:
Indeed. For the last 8 years, the U.S. has been a tin-horn dictatorship.
Mmmph. I got a very thorough verbal slapping the other day for daring to mention The Hague w.r.t. the last occupants of the White House. The salient comment was along the line of "It's our dog, and if needs be we'll shoot it ourselves".
At that point I was too tired, angry and by that point in the "discussion" frankly too drunk to ask why the last two Presidents to be successfully shot needed to be, aside from winning the cold war and going to the moon respectively.
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