Torture and Us

The Administration’s continuing efforts to justify torture are outrageous. There is no justification whatever that makes torture tolerable as an instrument of American policy. It is obscene to make exceptions. Either the country tolerates torture or it does not. It cannot be ‘sort of’ against. The Bush team, led by Dick Cheney, continues to try to draw distinctions between U.S. citizens, who they say should be safe from torture, and non-U.S. citizens inm foreign countries who may be subject to torture. This is a bogus distinction because some of those non-U.S. citizens are being held by the U.S. in foreign coiuntries exactly so they can be tortured. This is a ‘them and us’ type of argument that completely undermines any shred of respectability that the U.S. may have in the eyes of the world. It simply cannot be allowed. For America to reclaim some semblance of moral standing someone in Washington has to resist, and resist hard. Else there is no difference between the U.S. and any of the tyrants it purports to oppose. Stop it now!