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On the other hand, there's that line about "If you're not angry, you're not paying attention".
Fred Clark's got an entry up on the veto of the bill to prohibit torture.
The veto. Of the bill. That says the CIA can't torture.
From the President.
(I am trying to imagine how I would've reacted to hearing this ten years ago. "The President of the United States of America vetoed a bill that would've prohibited the CIA from torturing people." Never would have believed it then. Oh, lost and fractured innocence.)
Someone once told me there was a bit of the Geneva conventions that made special provisions for terrorists--that actually *allowed* this kind of torture. And I asked them for a reference. And they gave it to me. And I looked it up. And it did not at all say anything of the sort--I think it was something about how you were supposed to treat chaplains or something.
(Reminded me of that spam I got once which had a bunch of links at the end as references, and the ones that weren't broken were pointing to articles warning about the spam. Yeesh.)
From Fred Clark's article, a bitter and hypothetical conversation:
Fred Clark's got an entry up on the veto of the bill to prohibit torture.
The veto. Of the bill. That says the CIA can't torture.
From the President.
(I am trying to imagine how I would've reacted to hearing this ten years ago. "The President of the United States of America vetoed a bill that would've prohibited the CIA from torturing people." Never would have believed it then. Oh, lost and fractured innocence.)
Someone once told me there was a bit of the Geneva conventions that made special provisions for terrorists--that actually *allowed* this kind of torture. And I asked them for a reference. And they gave it to me. And I looked it up. And it did not at all say anything of the sort--I think it was something about how you were supposed to treat chaplains or something.
(Reminded me of that spam I got once which had a bunch of links at the end as references, and the ones that weren't broken were pointing to articles warning about the spam. Yeesh.)
From Fred Clark's article, a bitter and hypothetical conversation:
REPORTER: The president vetoed Congress' ban on torture.You don't avoid torturing because the person you're torturing doesn't deserve it (assuming you've even convinced yourself that you're qualified to make that decision). You avoid torturing or supporting torture because you aren't the kind of person who's okay with that.
EDITOR: We can't call it "torture."
REPORTER: Why not?
EDITOR: Because the government says that torture isn't torture.
REPORTER: But these are established terms -- legal terms set down in the Geneva ...
EDITOR: It's controversial.
REPORTER: It was ratified as American law in 1955.
EDITOR: Yeah, well, now it's controversial. And we try to avoid controversy. So we don't say "torture" anymore.
[...]
REPORTER: So if the government comes out and tells us that the rack isn't torture, we would just stop referring ...
EDITOR: Stretchboarding.
REPORTER: What?
