My Liberal Identity:
You are a Peace Patroller, also known as an anti-war liberal or neo-hippie. You believe in putting an end to American imperial conquest, stopping wars that have already been lost, and supporting our troops by bringing them home.
Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com
Covering Our Torturous Tracks
Someday soon, the ugly truth of what we do to our prisoners in the War On Terror will be known. When it will happen- before or after this disgusting administration leaves office?
The same bullshit justifications are being used to cover up; why, it's National Security! We need to keep the enemy guessing!
The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.
The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.
Who on earth believes this? It has been well known for some time what kind of techniques we use...unless the government is trying to protect itself against public knowledge of methods as yet unknown-methods likely more amoral and illegal than what we already know to be in use.
Waterboarding, it seems, is only the tip of the torture iceberg. In the public arena, it has proven surprisingly difficult to convince people that simulated drowning violates the spirit of international law, the Constitution and common decency. I suspect that once these other "techniques" are finally brought to light in court, there will be no ambiguity as to the nature of what we have done. When that day comes, I fervently hope less of us will be tempted to deny that something in the American experiment has gone horribly awry-and that neither exceptionalism nor ostensibly grave exigencies are excuses to flout the law...and surely not justifications to abandon the bedrock principles that define us as a people.
