Who We Are:
In the discussion about torture, one question never seems to come up: If it is okay to torture someone in order to save innocent victims of an impending attack, is it also okay to torture the innocent?
Nicholas Kristof describes, in today's New York Times, the plight of Guantánamo Bay detainee Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, who has been incarcerated for six years and subjected to humiliating and extremely painful measures in order to obtain information that, by this point, he obviously does not have.
In other words, Mr. Sami al-Hajj has been forced to suffer extreme physical and psychological torture so that Dick Cheney and his puppet George W. Bush can walk around with their chests puffed out, pretending to a machismo that both were too cowardly to express in their youth. You will recall that Cheney was a draft dodger, while Bush, using his family's connections, was a weekend warrior, pretending to be a fighter pilot.
Bush/Cheney supporters (a dwindling number, thankfully) will whine that Kristof is a bleeding heart liberal, but Bush/Cheney are the sorts of school yard bullies who don't actually dirty their hands by attacking the weak and defenseless directly. No, they are the little big mouths who stand off to the side and provoke some larger bully to do the dirty work for them, while they have their hands shoved into their pockets, playing pocket pool while watching. The definition of a sadist.
George W. Bush during the third presidential debate in Tempe, Arizona in 2004: "[Laura is] out campaigning along with our girls. And she speaks English a lot better than I do. I think people understand what she's saying."
In the discussion about torture, one question never seems to come up: If it is okay to torture someone in order to save innocent victims of an impending attack, is it also okay to torture the innocent?
Nicholas Kristof describes, in today's New York Times, the plight of Guantánamo Bay detainee Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman, who has been incarcerated for six years and subjected to humiliating and extremely painful measures in order to obtain information that, by this point, he obviously does not have.
In other words, Mr. Sami al-Hajj has been forced to suffer extreme physical and psychological torture so that Dick Cheney and his puppet George W. Bush can walk around with their chests puffed out, pretending to a machismo that both were too cowardly to express in their youth. You will recall that Cheney was a draft dodger, while Bush, using his family's connections, was a weekend warrior, pretending to be a fighter pilot.
Bush/Cheney supporters (a dwindling number, thankfully) will whine that Kristof is a bleeding heart liberal, but Bush/Cheney are the sorts of school yard bullies who don't actually dirty their hands by attacking the weak and defenseless directly. No, they are the little big mouths who stand off to the side and provoke some larger bully to do the dirty work for them, while they have their hands shoved into their pockets, playing pocket pool while watching. The definition of a sadist.
George W. Bush during the third presidential debate in Tempe, Arizona in 2004: "[Laura is] out campaigning along with our girls. And she speaks English a lot better than I do. I think people understand what she's saying."
posted by Jim | 12:15 PM
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