Morality and Values
Today's outrages included the revelation that along with sending the occasional deportee to Syria, it's become a routine practice to send detainees to Egypt, Syria, and Uzbekistan for interrogation. As if Egyptian and Syrian torture practices weren't bad enough, we now subcontract to Uzbekistan, where people can be boiled alive and their grieving mothers sentenced to hard labor for protesting it. They boil people alive, for gods' sake, and that's who the Bush administration funds and befriends.
Then there was the unprovoked shooting of a wounded and abandoned man in a mosque in Fallujah. After Abu Ghraib, it's hard not to respond with the weary thought that well, this was just the one they caught on film.
Speaking of Abu Ghraib, I thought it was bad enough that several former Iran-Contra felons had been rehired into government by the Bush administration, The Sequel. And I thought I was outraged when they got tripped up in lunacy like the attempted coup in Venezuela and the (hopefully) abortive Total Information Awareness project, though relieved that incompetence seemed to have trumped bad intent. Now we hear that the guy who drafted the memo purporting to lay out the legal underpinnings for torturing detainees in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, possibly the worst human relations disaster in my lifetime, will be the new Attorney General. You just had to know they were capable of finding someone more infuriating than John Ashcroft, and true to form, Team Bush didn't disappoint in Alberto Gonzales.
Even worse, only in today's America could the man who drafted that now infamous torture memo be seriously referred to as a moderate in an article calling the legal fiasco 'controversial.'
These are the values and morality of the Bush administration on full display. Kind of makes a person sentimental for the old-fashioned values of charity, humility, justice, loving your neighbor, and blessing the peacemakers.
Then there was the unprovoked shooting of a wounded and abandoned man in a mosque in Fallujah. After Abu Ghraib, it's hard not to respond with the weary thought that well, this was just the one they caught on film.
Speaking of Abu Ghraib, I thought it was bad enough that several former Iran-Contra felons had been rehired into government by the Bush administration, The Sequel. And I thought I was outraged when they got tripped up in lunacy like the attempted coup in Venezuela and the (hopefully) abortive Total Information Awareness project, though relieved that incompetence seemed to have trumped bad intent. Now we hear that the guy who drafted the memo purporting to lay out the legal underpinnings for torturing detainees in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, possibly the worst human relations disaster in my lifetime, will be the new Attorney General. You just had to know they were capable of finding someone more infuriating than John Ashcroft, and true to form, Team Bush didn't disappoint in Alberto Gonzales.
Even worse, only in today's America could the man who drafted that now infamous torture memo be seriously referred to as a moderate in an article calling the legal fiasco 'controversial.'
These are the values and morality of the Bush administration on full display. Kind of makes a person sentimental for the old-fashioned values of charity, humility, justice, loving your neighbor, and blessing the peacemakers.
3 Comments:
I find the rush to judgement on the marine in fallujah who shot an insurrgent; **who as a class of people blow up their own citizens, **behead CARE aid workers, destroy infastructure needed for life in the dessert, and thwart the effort of any semblance of freedom and democracy to protrect their autocratic closed society of abuse and intimidation, very interesting. The link in the article brought the reader to a page of news that celebrates that the video was aired nearly non-stop in Iraq.. Nice support. When the WTC was terroristicly destroyed and millions of New Yorkers and international visitors and Americans in general were thrust into harms way, we were cautioned to be calm, stay focussed, don't lash out, don't pre-judge... We also quickly edited news videos of victims hurling their bodies out of a roaring inferno to their ultimate deaths... we cut the sound of a body coming to an abrut halt as it meets the pavement after a 30+ story fall. We haven't been overwhelmed with all of the funerals, and the emotional torture of the relatives, the surviving and suffering relatives.. We put a nice face on it... Why? To save ourselves from wallowing in exactly what AlJazeeza inflames the Arabs with... and you apparently support this.
BTW: I came to this site today, as a result of the case making headlines about a 36 Yr old woman, mother of seven.. four of whom are with their dad, divorced from this horror of a mother. I was curious waht type of place King County was, and this site came up as a search. Three of her children were victimized by your community and their sperm donor for a father, they were neglected... this alcoholic has had 3 children in 3 years after loosing custody of her first four...Now the two youngest are dead, because Alcoholic mom OD'd on booze. No one saw this coming? Her new husband? How about her prenatal care giver, or wherever she birthed these kids... Nice liberal community... Keep supporting the right to destroy what is good. Keep the perspective fuzzy.. The Marine desreves at least as much sensitivity as this butcher mom got from her community.. BTW; she was charged in the past with neglect issues.. the paper work isn't finished, but lets not "pre-Judge" her... she is not responsible, she is a victim of the system.... Who will take responsibility for this?
I don't expect to see this post published.. Freedom of Expression and all...
Awww. Look at the funny reddie. They just can't ever shake their collective persecution complex, can they?
First, my personal anger over the shooting in Fallujah is directed towards the civilian leadership who created this situation. It was sad to me to hear that the soldier who did this had been only recently wounded by a booby-trapped body, and it makes some amount of sense that he wasn't thinking straight. Why was he sent back to duty so soon after that trauma?
Armies break things and kill people, and if it isn't for an unimpeachably good reason, that civilian leadership had better know that these things will not only happen, but that they'll make life more dangerous for the rest of the soldiers serving there.
Does it really matter how any of us, here, feel about that footage getting played over and over again in Iraq? The fact is that it IS getting played over and over, and that reality holds consequences.
And regarding King County, child abuse happens in every community. When you want to hold all of Texas accountable for Susan Smith and Andrea Yates, then you can come here and blame every member of the most populous county in Washington State the same way. You would still be wrong to assign that collective guilt, but at least you wouldn't be a hypocrite.
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