Tuesday, June 21, 2005

The going thing among lefty bloggers right now seems to be pointing out that "we have become a nation that tortures". So when Bellatrys points out that, given what we know about the CIA's activities in Latin America over the past few decades, that's kind of old news, it's a useful corrective.

Still, something's changed when Chris Wallace on Fox News responds to reports of prisoners at Gitmo chained up for days and defecating on themselves by saying that prisoners at Auschwitz "would have been very happy to be allowed to defecate on themselves." Back in the day, when our ambassador in Honduras, John Negroponte (gosh, where is he now?) denied all knowledge of death squads run by the dictatorship we were sponsoring there, it was all proxies and deniability. They seemed to know enough, back then, to be embarrassed by it.

As the man says (one of the same guys linked above, incidentally), "Guess what? Sometimes you're on a slope, and you're sliding."

(Wallace quote via Atrios).

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yes, I suppose I would choose being hogtied and burned with cigarettes over being machine-gunned into an open pit. WTF is your point, Chris?

9:25 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The most readable, thorough, and best documented history of CIA involvement with torture is an article by Alfred McCoy at TomDispatch on September 2004.

Nell Lancaster
nlancaster@rockbridge.net

2:10 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The point is that one could expect a free democratic country to live up to much higher standards then Nazi-run Auschwitz death camp. Justifying Gitmo by making comparisons with Auschwitz is tasteless and speaks something about the level of expectations Fox News has from the US Army: "At least don't be as brutal as Hitler's SS".

11:52 AM  

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