Megan, a foe of the health insurance reform, reacts to the report on the three alleged homicides-by-torture at Gitmo:
I usually do not swear on this blog. But all I can think of is a quote from PJ O'Rourke on seeing young kids shot by the IDF: "This is bullshit. This is barbarism." This is not how a decent country acts, which is presumably why we lied about it.
I expect tomorrow, if Brown wins, we'll hear a lot of talk about a Republican resurgence. But unless the Republicans can come up with a more convincing program to keep stuff like this from happening--and a more convincing economic program than cutting taxes in the face of record deficits--I don't think they're ready to lead.
My conservative readers are no doubt winding up to tell me I'm a liberal sellout. But I don't think it's particularly bleeding heart to think that we shouldn't have to fake suicides to cover up for abusing prisoners. In fact, I think that's the stance of a hard core believer in law and order.
More accurately, the obvious inference from the Harper's piece is that the Bush administration faked suicides to cover up for torturing prisoners to death.
Remember that for John Yoo, the only thing you couldn't do to a captive prisoner was to murder him. But we have scores of corpses from the interrogation program to show that even this most extreme position was violated. And this time, we have it in Gitmo, a place where Bush and Cheney cannot possibly scapegoat the grunts for the policy they enforced. It was under their direct control. And we still don't know who was over-seeing this particular torture session in "Camp No."
If this is investigated by the Obama administration (and if they don't, we will discover that their opposition to torture is a lie), and it turns out that Horton is right, we will not need to prosecute Cheney and Bush for war crimes. We can simply prosecute them for being accessories to murder.
If the president authorizes someone's murder, that is still against the law, isn't it? Or would John Yoo believe that was part of George Washington's legacy as well?