Profound Quotes

"Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel. It's that our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment; it might as well be written into the job description. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers - (let alone American soldiers - do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to." From 'Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower' by William Blum

From "9-11, Six Years Later": "If one looks at the credentials of skeptics compared to the credentials of defenders of the official line, it is impossible to dismiss skeptics as kooks. There are many people with strong imaginations on the Internet, but serious skeptics stick to known facts, known violations of standard procedures and the laws of physics. The vast majority of the people who call skeptics "kooks" are themselves ignorant of physics and have little comprehension of the improbability that such an attack could succeed without either the complicity or complete failure of government agencies. " Paul Craig Roberts

"Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular? But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right." Martin Luther King, Jr.

Categories
« THE NEW DISCOURSE ON ANTI-SEMITISM « Desertpeace  
  In the Name of Venality | vanityfair.com »

Why torture questions must be answered - Las Vegas Sun

Jerry Bitts, Las Vegas

Fri, May 8, 2009 (2:05 a.m.)

A May 1 editorial in the Las Vegas Sun called for a bipartisan commission to investigate the Bush administration’s torture policy. In response, a Monday letter to the editor from Bob Lewicki — headlined “Just where would commissions end?” — ironically claimed we should investigate everything then, including George Washington and the cherry tree incident.

Yet there is something unique with the Bush torture policy. It is the first time I know of that the CIA was used by the United States to torture prisoners in our custody.

The idea that our country does not torture is based on World War II policies, but since 1950 the CIA has been studying torture techniques and has been exporting its knowledge abroad through the Office of Public Safety and the School of the Americas. However, torture was not our official policy, until the George W. Bush administration.

We cannot move forward with a torture precedent in our immediate past, even if torture worked. Do international law, our treaties and our Constitution mean nothing? Can American citizens be tortured? Is our fear of what attacks might happen more important to us than what will certainly happen if we permit our government to torture those whom it determines to be “enemies of the people”? Where will it all end, indeed?

Why torture questions must be answered - Las Vegas Sun.

May 8th, 2009 | Tags: | Category: imperialism, militarism, military/industrial complex, persecution, prison/security/industrial complex, prosecution, social justice, torture, war crimes | Leave a comment |

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Security Code: