The Washington Post demands that the US put torture of prisoners on the agenda in talks with Iran! No, seriously. No irony. Just pure denialism:
The cases of torture and rape of prisoners courageously documented by opposition presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi should be as worthy of discussion as the non-nuclear subjects that Iran wants to bring up.
Has it occurred to Fred Hiatt that the days in which America could lecture any other country on torture of prisoners are over. Does he believe his own paper's cowardly refusal to call it what it is has any resonance outside the U.S.? Until president Bush takes full responsibility or the architects of the torture program are brought to justice - the US has scant moral or legal standing to challenge any abuse of prisoners in other regimes. Greenwald:
I don't think this is a case of conscious exceptionalism-based double standards. I think The Washington Post Editors have brains which tell them that the U.S. continues to be the world's leader in human rights, due process, and accountability for abuses, and that it's perfectly natural that we would go around demanding reform from other nations in these areas and do so with moral credibility. As bizarre as it is, that really seems to be the mental world they occupy. And they're far from alone there.
This is my formulation of the point:
America is exceptional not because it banished evil, not because Americans are somehow more moral than anyone else, not because its founding somehow changed human naturebut because it recognized the indelibility of human nature and our permanent capacity for evil. It set up a rule of law to guard against such evil. It pitted branches of government against each other and enshrined a free press so that evil could be flushed out and countered even when perpetrated by good men.
The belief that when America tortures, the act is somehow not torture, or that when Americans torture, they are somehow immune from its moral and spiritual cancer, is not an American belief. It is as great a distortion of American exceptionalism as jihadism is of Islam.