Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Just Joking...

Scott Horton:
...a recent conference I attended in Italy with a group of European and American counterterrorism experts. A large team of U.S. Department of Justice officials, drawn from its uppermost echelons, was there, including three of the principal architects of the legal policies for the war on terror. In not-for-attribution comments, one openly acknowledged that the war on terror was cast in the first instance as a political ploy and that it was a conceptual failure. It was now essential for the Americans to move on to something else, he argued. None of the others challenged that view; indeed, two of them said that they agreed with it. So even inside of the Bush Administration, the war on terror has been written off as a scam that served its limited political purpose and is finished. However, this intellectual refuse continues to be the policy of the U.S. government: people suffer in prison and are tortured and abused because of it. That’s intellectual bankruptcy.
Jeepers, I'd call it moral bankruptcy. Or how about criminal?

1 comment:

MT said...

Horton's unflinching coarseness is reminding me of Lehrer's "Fight Fiercely, Harvard!"