Flutterby™! : Politics

A couple of people have sent me this New York Times article about deaths by torture of prisoners in Afghanistan. I've been trying to come up with some coherent commentary about current U.S. policy, and it hasn't happened, so here's some incoherent rambling, and if anyone wants to have a political discussion this is as good a place as any to hang it.

The main conclusion I've come to from articles like these is that there's enough similarity in reports from disparate regions, and reports of "extraordinary rendition" and other applications of torture, that we can safely conclude that Lynndie England and her cohorts at Abu Ghraib were not acting on their own accord, and that the use of torture does go up some chain of command and across some common teaching system.

And that our commander in chief needs to stop sticking his fingers in his ears and hollering "lalala I can't hear you lalala" and take a strong moral stand.

One of the secondary conclusions is that whether or not Newsweek is caving under pressure in retracting their story, flushing a Koran down the toilet is not torture, and if we cave to people who complain about symbolic gestures like that then we start down a slippery slope.

But on that strong moral stand thing, I guess we're not going to get it from someone who's can't keep his own morality straight:

"I made it very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers' money to promote science which destroys life in order to save life is - I'm against that. And therefore, if the bill does that, I will veto it.''

We now return you to your regular Flutterby.