The Torture Administration--Anthony Lewis--The Nation

posted December 7, 2005 (December 26, 2005 issue) The Nation

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051226/lewis

article | posted December 7, 2005 (December 26, 2005 issue)
The Torture Administration
Anthony Lewis


"When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 and proceeded to carry out their savagery, many in the outside world asked how this could have happened in the land of Goethe and Beethoven. Would the people of other societies as readily accept tyranny? Sinclair Lewis, in 1935, imagined Americans turning to dictatorship under the pressures of economic distress in the Depression. He called his novel, ironically, It Can't Happen Here.

Hannah Arendt and many others have stripped us, since then, of confidence that people will resist evil in times of fear. When Serbs and Rwandan Hutus were told that they were threatened, they slaughtered their neighbors. Lately Philip Roth was plausible enough when he imagined anti-Semitism surging after an isolationist America elected Charles Lindbergh as President in 1940.

But it still comes as a shock to discover that American leaders will open the way for the torture of prisoners, that lawyers will invent justifications for it, that the President of the United States will strenuously resist legislation prohibiting cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners--and that much of the American public will be indifferent to what is being done in its name.


The pictures from Abu Ghraib, first shown to the public on April 28, 2004, evoked a powerful reaction. Americans were outraged when they saw grinning US soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners. But it was seeing the mistreatment that produced the outrage, or so we must now conclude. Since then the Bush Administration and its lawyers have prevented the release of any more photographs or videotapes. And the public has not reacted similarly to the disclosure, without pictures, of worse actions, including murder. "



Detailed examination of the topic--well worth reading!

like THe Handmaids Tale, 1984, Fahrenheit 451; this stuff is real.

kind of journalism to those that are totally unaware, not necessarily O'Reilly or Limbaugh fans?
We're living in a vacuum not of our own making.

the television media, or at least a fragment of it, has got to be able to operate on true journalistic principles. Corporate-sponsored "entertainment-style" news, that is the lapdog of status quo, will do us in. There simply must be a way to escape that stranglehold, or the Orwellian stuff will go unchecked.

a classic about the right of defendents to legal counsel . . . if you haven't read it, it's worth your time . . .

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679723129/qid=1134280182/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/103-8612771-6007050?s=books&v=glance&n=283155