Torture and us
"Torture violates the basic dignity of the human person that all religions, in their highest ideals, hold dear," the advertisement said. "Any policies that permit torture and inhumane treatment are shocking and morally intolerable."
In a news release, Cardinal McCarrick said every human being has "a special dignity... that comes from the fact that we are brothers and sisters in God's one human family."
"It is because of this that we all feel that torture is a dehumanizing and terrible attack against human nature and the respect we owe for each other," he added.
The release said that although torture has "long been banned by U.S. treaty obligations," a statement issued by President George W. Bush at the signing of the McCain Amendment banning the use of torture "implies that the president is not bound by the amendment in his role as commander in chief."
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Sorry to offend.. but my gut tells me that history will not treat us kindly as we review our our response to terrorism in this area.
I realize now that the moral authority I thought the USA embodied in this area was a mirage of wishful thinking. As I imagine the Germans experienced under the Nazis, we are immobilized, unable to think.
We can argue about it, but only on grounds of self defense, not morals.
Hunger strikes and suicides are the voice coming from this human scum that will not be silenced. We have joined them in the dance.
posted by Joseph | Wednesday, June 14, 2006
1 Comments:
George Bush has carried us into a uniquely American form of National Socialism, and all while you weren't looking. We've been given analogues to the Reichstag fire and the repression associated with it; the Gliewitz episode and its resemblance to the no-fly zone incitement of Iraq prior to the onset of the formal agression; the abandonment of Geneva Convention and Nuremburg principles respecting treatment of combatants and the institution of rules not unlike the infamous "Commissar Order" given by Hitler at the time of his launching of Case Barbarrossa. Frankly, if talk radio and the web weren't serving as forms of expression for brownshirts of the Limbaugh/Hannity variety, they'd likely be SA-style street violence against anti-war activists as well; already there is surveillance of them. But most analogous is the silence and disgraceful cooperation of the Congress and the American people and the support given the war by "German Church" look-alike, Fr. John Richard Neuhaus. Funded by neo-conservative thinktanks, Neuhaus' journal, First Things, like Der Sturmer before it, enjoys the distinction of being one of the Regime's most ardent voices. Catholics need keep a very close eye indeed on Neuhaus and his pre-emption advocacy, that and his urging of Catholic political alliances with warmongering Evangelicals of the Richard Land stripe.
John Lowell
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