(no subject)
Jun. 28th, 2005 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ebonlockAnother brilliant post from Digby:
We kidnapped this man off the street as he left a courthouse that freed him for lack of evidence. He was sent to Guantanamo. And he has no further recourse anywhere to assert his innocence.
We have no way of knowing how many people we have done this to, but clearly there are quite a few. It makes me sick to my stomach to contemplate that innocent people are caught up in it. And without due process we simply cannot be sure that there aren't. In fact, we know there are.
I'm getting old now and I don't know how long it will take for this stuff to sort itself out. Maybe I won't be alive to see it. But at some point there is going to be some sort of reckoning. It's happening in Argentina right now. Cambodians are beginning to come to terms with what was done. And no I'm not comparing us to them, except to say that unless we get some transparency there is every reason to fear that we are heading into that territory. As I wrote in that post in February:
We are disappearing people, rendering them to friendly governments that aren't afraid to put the electrode to genitals and threaten with dog rape. And we are building our own infrastructure of torture and extra legal imprisonment. It is a law of human nature that if you build it, they will come. This infrastructure will be expanded and bureaucratized. It's already happening.
John Yoo, one of the primary architects of the Gitmo regimes said:
“Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?”
Because we are supposed to be a nation of laws, not men. If we can fashion laws that cover behavior like genocide, war crimes, child molestation and serial killing, surely we can find a way to cover terrorism.
We kidnapped this man off the street as he left a courthouse that freed him for lack of evidence. He was sent to Guantanamo. And he has no further recourse anywhere to assert his innocence.
We have no way of knowing how many people we have done this to, but clearly there are quite a few. It makes me sick to my stomach to contemplate that innocent people are caught up in it. And without due process we simply cannot be sure that there aren't. In fact, we know there are.
I'm getting old now and I don't know how long it will take for this stuff to sort itself out. Maybe I won't be alive to see it. But at some point there is going to be some sort of reckoning. It's happening in Argentina right now. Cambodians are beginning to come to terms with what was done. And no I'm not comparing us to them, except to say that unless we get some transparency there is every reason to fear that we are heading into that territory. As I wrote in that post in February:
We are disappearing people, rendering them to friendly governments that aren't afraid to put the electrode to genitals and threaten with dog rape. And we are building our own infrastructure of torture and extra legal imprisonment. It is a law of human nature that if you build it, they will come. This infrastructure will be expanded and bureaucratized. It's already happening.
John Yoo, one of the primary architects of the Gitmo regimes said:
“Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?”
Because we are supposed to be a nation of laws, not men. If we can fashion laws that cover behavior like genocide, war crimes, child molestation and serial killing, surely we can find a way to cover terrorism.
