Torture - America's Shame

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Andrew Sullivan …

“…the question of torture – and the United States’ embrace of inhumanity as a core American value under the presidency of George W. Bush – remains, in my view, the pre-eminent moral question in American politics. The descent of the United States – and of Americans in general – to lower standards of morality and justice than those demanded by Iranians of their regime is a sign of the polity’s moral degeneracy.”

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“This is what Bush and Cheney truly achieved in their tragic response to 9/11: two terribly failed, brutally expensive wars, the revival of sectarian warfare and genocide in the Middle East, the end of America’s global moral authority, the empowerment of Iran’s and North Korea’s dictatorships, and the nightmares of Gitmo and Bagram still haunting the new administration.”

“But what they did to the culture – how they systematically dismantled core American values like the prohibition on torture and respect for the rule of law – is the worst and most enduring of the legacies. One political party in this country is now explicitly pro-torture, and wants to restore a torture regime if it regains power. Decent conservatives for the most part simply looked the other way. Unless these cultural forces in defense of violence and torture are defeated – not appeased or excused, but defeated – America will never return the way it once was.”

You’ll need to read the entire piece to understand why Sullivan writes…

“Our job, in other words, is to raise the core moral baseline of Americans to that of Iranians. That’s the depth of the hole Cheney dug. And it’s a hole the current GOP wants to dig deeper and darker.”

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