I am surprised you did not highlight what me and my colleagues agreed was the single most horrifying passage from the Court’s decision. It was the Court’s quotation of something an interrogator said to al-Rabiah during his interrogation. The interrogator told al-Rabiah:The Bush Administration was pure evil. We, the United States of America, tortured an innocent may in order to get him to confess to something that would excuse his arrest, detention and torture.“There is nothing against you. But there is no innocent person here. So, you should confess to something so you can be charged and sentenced and serve your sentence and then go back to your family and country, because you will not leave this place innocent.”
Court Memorandum and Order, p. 41 (emphasis mine).
This was not a statement pulled from the transcripts of the Nuremburg trials, nor archival evidence taken from reports smuggled out of one of Stalin’s gulags. This was a statement made by an agent of this government less than 7 years ago to a detainee. The enormity of that is nearly incomprehensible.
But even worse – far worse – is the fact that the government would nevertheless still seek to convict based on the resulting confession.
To those of us who read that passage and who vowed and make it our vocation to serve and protect the Constitution of the United States, that fact is a gut-punch. For me and my colleagues, it literally took our breath away. It makes one wonder how far down into the abyss we have allowed ourselves to drop. And whether there is the political will to find our way out.
First point: Could the Bush Administration have sunk to any lower levels of depravity and immorality? Dick Cheney might as well have been skull-fucking dead puppies.
Second: By not moving fast to clean this mess up, the Obama Administration is taking on the same stink of evil.
Third: To everyone who has been rationalizing and excusing the actions of the Bush Administration: The stink of this is all over you as well. You are the "good little Germans" of this mess. The Bush Administration was a cabal of evil. If you agree with what was done by them, if you have, to use a contract phrase, "adopted, ratified and approved" what they have done, you are a guilty and yes, as evil, as they are.
The four letters that will brand our nations stature for the next few decades are: I R A Q.
ReplyDeleteWe were shocked to the core by 9/11, but that cannot be the excuse used for our invasion and destruction of a country which had done us no harm. What was done in Americas name will not be forgotten by those who experienced it - it will be passed on to other generations, proof that we are truly evil. Our further perfidy under "The Rule of Law" (ha) with regards to treatment of those in our custody has already done much to tarnish us. This is just another report of how far we've fallen, and still refuse to change.