I�m sure most of you have grown tired of my political ranting, but I feel something here needs to be said as we are about to witness the confirmation of our new Attorney General- Alberto Gonzales. His predecessor, John Ashcroft, did much in the way of circumventing personal freedoms and liberties granted to us by the Bill of Rights (all of this was of course done for the good of the land). It is now clear that W thought Ashcroft did such a bang-up job during his stint he wanted to nominate somebody who could fill those dictatorial shoes- possibly even exceed them. Through a process of redefinition largely overseen by Alberto himself, a practice that was once a clear and abhorrent violation of the law has become in effect the law of the land. While the White House publicly fained outrage at what took place at Abu Ghraib, in private, they had set the wheels in motion that led to the systematic torture of prisoners nearly two years earlier. As White House Consul, Alberto Gonzales worked on legal maneuvering which proclaimed the United States did not need to abide by the Geneva Conventions when dealing with terrorists (insert requisite WTF!?! here). After a great deal of both national and international pressure condemning the use of torture, the Department of Justice, under Mr. Gonzales's urging, simply redefined the word to mean procedures that would produce pain "of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure." Through this act of legal bullshittery, interrogation techniques which previously had been considered �torture� suddenly became something less than that. The fall-out from Abu Ghraib is still underway- many military peons caught in the crossfire are still awaiting trial and the slow trickle of litigation is certain to bring before the next attorney general a raft of torture cases that challenge the very policies that he personally helped devise and put into practice. While the attorney general is charged with upholding the law, countless documents show that as White House counsel, Mr. Gonzales, in the matter of torture, helped his client (read George Walker Bush) to concoct strategies to circumvent it. Does this strike anyone else as completely fucked up?
Here is an example of what we�re talking about taken from an account offered by an unnamed F.B.I. counterterrorism official reporting in August, more than three months after the Abu Ghraib images appeared, on what he saw during a visit to Guant�namo:
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more...When I asked the M.P.'s what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion...the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."
Shit like this doesn�t just happen- these are not �abuses�, they are procedures agreed upon by the administration that have flowed through the chain of command. Three fucking months after the story of Abu Ghraib finally broke.
How can we stand for this? Most people in this country are so fucking lazy and callous they don�t even pay attention to the walls crumbling around them. We gaze at the photographs and read the documents with glazed over eyes, and then we listen to the president's spokesman "reiterate," as he did last week, "the president's determination that the United States never engage in torture," as he nominates the man responsible for it to the highest law enforcement position in the country. Bush is able to do this because administration officials clearly expect, and senators of both parties well understand, most Americans - the Americans who will not read the reports, who will soon forget the photographs and who will be loath to dwell on a repellent subject - are generally content to take the president at his word. God Bless America.

Gen. Joseph P. Hoar pointed out this week, the administration's decision on the Geneva Conventions "puts all American servicemen and women at risk that are serving in combat regions." For General Hoar - a retired commander of American forces in the Middle East and one of a dozen prominent retired generals and admirals to oppose Mr. Gonzales - torture has a way of undermining the forces using it.
The general's concerns are understandable. The war in Iraq and the war on terrorism are fundamentally political in nature. If we are going to win the catch-phrase �War on Terror� it isn�t going to be with soldiers, guns, bombs or firepower. If we are going to truly claim victory, it will be because our ideals, morals and freedoms are able to dissuade the �terrorists� into thinking that we have the right idea- that we have their best interests at heart. By using torture, we relinquish that very ideological advantage - the promotion of democracy, freedom and human rights - that the president has so persistently claimed is America's most powerful weapon in defeating Islamic extremism. One does not reach democracy, or freedom, through torture. By using torture, America transforms itself into the very caricature our enemies have sought to make of us- thereby ensuring our defeat. And by nominating Mr. Gonzales, President Bush has clearly shown he is too fucking stupid to understand that.

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