Glenn Grenwald/Digby from Salon.com on tasers and society

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/08/11/tasers/index.html

Tuesday Aug. 11, 2009 18:11 EDT
Let's talk about tasers

Editor's note: Glenn Greenwald is on vacation this week. Digby is guest-blogging today.

Like Glenn, I write a lot about civil liberties, which have been at the heart of the national conversation since the beginning of the War On Terror and the expansion of the national security state. But my interest in civil liberties predates 9/11 and until then was usually pointed at the far more prosaic issues of police and prosecutorial misconduct (and the inevitable conclusions any study of those things brings to the issue of the death penalty). Nowadays, the theme of civil liberties seem to be a sub-plot to a James Bond flick rather than "To Kill A Mockingbird." And yet, I think the two are intertwined much more closely that we think. In our apparent acceptance of torture as a legal method of interrogation, the bar of civilized official behavior has been lowered to the point where we are accepting torture in everyday life as if it's nothing. Indeed, we are using it as a form of entertainment.

Cross post:

Mother twice tasered for "speeding" (false charges)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6296609&mesg_id=6296609