Subject:
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The Torturers Among Us
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Wed, 9 Jun 2004 12:00:52 GMT
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Viewed:
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571 times
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Count on a professional newspaper columnist to articulate so clearly what I have
been saying for the past three years. The Bush Administration has abused the
9/11 tragedy as an excuse to engage in a deplorable deterioration of human
rights. The whole lot of them should be handed over to an international court
to be tried for war crimes.
~~~~~~~
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/06/09/the_torturers_among_us/
Some highlights:
...It is unambiguously clear that the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, at
Guantanamo, and at Abu Ghraib was official policy. Lawyers for the Pentagon and
the White House, reporting directly to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
President Bush, wrote contorted legal briefs trying to define a category of
person immune to both due process of law and the Third Geneva Convention.
...The grotesque abuses at Abu Ghraib were therefore not the work of a few
renegade freaks.
...For nearly three years, the Bush administration has resorted to the most
preposterous fictions to define either locales or categories of people to whom
the law does not apply. If you connect the dots, the torture at Abu Ghraib is
part of a larger slide toward tyranny as the Bush administration tries to exempt
itself from the rule of law.
...The Third Geneva Convention is airtight. Its language allows for no special
cases where torture is permitted and no gradations of acceptable forms of
torture. Prisoners are not required to give their captors information beyond
name, rank, and serial number, period. Captors are not allowed to resort to
coercion, either physical or psychological. There is no category of alleged
crime beyond the rule of law.
...Moreover, the legal protections of the US Constitution do not speak of
citizens; they speak of "persons."
~~~~~~~
Well, gotta run. I hear the Storm Troopers kicking in my door, so I guess I'm
off for an indefinite "vacation" in lovely Guantanamo Bay. (After all, I'm
clearly a dangerous supporter of terrorism because I would dare to criticise our
mindless leader during this difficult election year.)
- Chris.
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