Let's get rid of E Pluribus Unum as our national motto

I read this story in The Guardian about how Parkland massacre survivors have been attacked with hoaxes and smears.

To me, this is not really about the smearing of those kids (although I personally feel sorry for them that they have to endure this garbage after what else they've had to endure).

 

I am more broadly disturbed by the extent to which toxic hate propaganda - often outright lies but always malicious - has taken over our public discourse.

 

To use this example, criticize what these kids are saying and proposing. Sure, that's fair game. No one is exempt from that.

 

But to circulate malicious lies like how one of them allegedly tore up a copy of the Constitution - she did not - is downright evil. It's evil because it's sole purpose is to sow hatred and division.

 

People who support any form of gun control are not Nazis. People who own guns are not murderers. Neither group is homogeneous enough for such labels. And it's hardly just this one issue where such poison is flooding society. It's all of them.

 

I've read somewhat extensively about the Holocaust, Rwanda and other 20th century genocides and they all - WITHOUT EXCEPTION - started not with physical violence but with a rigorous and systematic hate campaign designed to demonize whichever group was being targeted. Once these groups were dehumanized with words, it became much easier to commit atrocities against them with actions.

 

The level of toxicity is becoming poisonous. You can be passionate and provocative without being hateful. It is truly threatening our country. We have always been a violent society, even in the best of times. There is no reason to think that, if left unchecked, this will end well.

 

If we consider ourselves a civilized nation, let's act like it. If we consider ourselves a Christian nation, let's act like it.

Mandela's legacy was about human dignity

"For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." -Nelson Mandela

South Africa's first democratic president Nelson Mandela passed away yesterday. Mandela is the most important world statesman of the last 70 years.

Much has been said about the great man's contribution to justice and reconciliation, so I'll focus on something different.

Abraham Lincoln said, "Anyone can overcome adversity. If you really want to test a man's character, give him power."

And this is perhaps the most significant way in which Mandela distinguished himself: by NOT pretending he was indispensable to his nation's fate.

He could easily have erected a cult of personality around himself. So many liberation leaders around the world fell into that trap. His insistence on instead choosing the greater good is one of the biggest reasons he is so universally admired.

He was denounced as a terrorist by misleaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. But as state sponsors of terrorism themselves, they were in no position to cast judgment on a man who was fighting for freedom as they fought against it.

But much like with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mandela's legacy is usually oversimplified, at least in western countries. It's oversimplified into his role in the fight for legal equality for black people. In fact, his real quest, much like Dr. Lking's was for the complete, fundamental dignity of human beings. That included legal equality but was much broader.

He argued that poverty and inequality "have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils."

That was his legacy.

Why are chemical weapons deaths worse than conventional weapons deaths?

Discussion topic: the UN estimates that approximately 100,000 people have been killed during the Syrian civil war (not all by Assad’s forces) with conventional weapons over the course of a few years. There has been no serious discussion of a response by external military powers in that time period.

Yet a single attack of chemical weapons that kills a small fraction of that number of people “necessitates” a global (ie: western) military response, we are told.

So why is it that the 1400 deaths caused by chemical weapons is more “morally repugnant,” to use Sec. of State Kerry’s phrase, than the 100,000 deaths that preceded it by conventional weapons?

If the answer is some piece of paper called a treaty, then the follow up question is why does that piece of paper value chemical weapons deaths more? Why does it view those deaths as more of a threat when, by any objective measurement, conventional weapons cause far more deaths and are much more of a threat to international stability?

Newtown did not change us

After the massacre of several dozen school children and others in Newtown, CT, there was plenty of talk Newtown “changed us,” it didn’t. Within a few days, Americans were back to their usual pantomime political tribalism..

It’s like I said the day after Newtown. If we’re not willing to change something about our society, then nothing will change. Not exactly high philosophy but it means if we’re not willing to change something significant, we simply have to accept that there will be lots of needless deaths in our country, whether by children or by mall denizens, whether via guns or via other means. If we’re not willing to change something about our too frequent use of violence as a means of first resort, then all the sorrow and hand-wringing will be continue to be as hollow as it’s been. America has been a violent society from the beginning. Far greater massacres have done little to curb these impulses, so I have no expectation that Newtown will make any significant dent in how we act.

There was a (presumably) pro-gun control graphic that made the rounds after Newtown. It pointed out the rate of gun deaths in various western countries, the US of course being the highest. I was struck by it but in a different way the the authors likely intended. I was struck the fact that the two countries with the lowest per capita death by gun rates on the list were the UK and Switzerland. 

Britain has virtually banned private handgun ownership and has very strict gun control laws. Switzerland has one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world and, if I understand correctly, has very little in the way of gun control laws. These two extremes of these supposedly “causational” factors have both resulted in far lower gun-related deaths than our own country.

Focusing solely on gun control is taking the easy way out, because even if the gun control makes a positive impact, that impact will be too small to make any significant difference by itself. We need to look deeper.

The problem is greater than what guns or ammunition is available or whether every school janitor has an AK47.  So changing gun laws or creating national registries of gun owners or the mentally ill or arming every special ed aid and bus driver in schools may or may not help a small amount but will not fundamentally change the situation because it doesn’t address its broader problem. We have to look deeper and that’s not something we’re not nearly as good at as we are invoking the Nazis in every argument and then going back to American Idol.

Licensing bicyclists? Not yet.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the city's government has come up with a money-making scheme to license bicyclists.

In general, I'm not a big fan of licensing bikes. It's not because I'm a biker myself and don't want to give the government any more of my money. It's because the infrastructure is not set up to permit bikers to get from here to there in a safe, easy, reasonable manner.

A biker who strictly follows the rules of the road to the letter 100 percent of the time will either not get anywhere or will get killed or maimed. As someone who averages 1500-2000 miles a year on such devices, I can tell you this is an indisputable fact.

A few examples...

Turning left legally requires bikers to get into the same turning lane as motor vehicles. In many places, particularly soulless suburbia, this means taking your life in your own hand. If you live in this area, try turning left from Route 9 (going north) in Queensbury on to Aviation Road using the legally correct lane. Make sure you have a friend nearby to call 9-1-1.

Another good example is stoplights. Many of them will not turn green if only a bicycle is waiting because its sensors do not recognize the bike, thus leaving the biker with no legal option.

Governments should not 'pull a Cuomo' on this one. If they insist on this money grab, upgrade the infrastructure first. Make it so bikers can follow the law safely and efficiently before enacting such a scheme.

We've met the enemy and it is us

For all the money this country has spent supposedly to fight Islamist terrorism, the real enemy is ourselves. A story in The Atlantic  notes that since 9/11/2001, over 334,000 Americans have been killed by guns used by other Americans. So in that time period, 100 Americans have been killed by a fellow American for every 1 America killed by an Islamist terrorist. So maybe we should drop the canned talking points about how we need more gun control or how every child should be given a gun upon entering elementary school. And maybe we should talk more about how we can become a more civilized, less barbaric nation. Every nation has murderers, psychopaths and crazy people, but proportionally, our culture seems to produce a lot more of them proportionally. Let's look in the mirror.

Single parenthood causes child abuse, claims GOP Taliban

It seems the Republican strategy for 2012 is to see how low a percentage of the women's vote they can get. The latest in their anti-female crusade comes from Wisconsin. Two (male of course) state legislators have introduced a bill mandating that schools brainwash children into blaming "non-marital parenthood" for child abuse. The bill would also describe fathers as the primary prevention against such domestic violence.

One of the co-authors of the bill, obviously an admirer of the Taliban's social views, has also come out against divorce for any reason, including spousal abuse. His advice to battered women: try hard to find reasons to love the man that's brutalizing you.

Muslim Americans twice as likely to oppose attacks on civilians than Catholics, Protestants

Poll cited by Yes! magazine:

% of Muslim Americans who say military attacks on civilians is never justified: 78

% of Catholic Americans who agree: 39

% of Protestant Americans who agree: 38

That saintly bipartisanship in action (or: it's not just the 1st Amendment they're trying to invalidate)

It's not just the 1st Amendment they want to get rid of. Federal senators have put rancor aside and are working tireless lyto destroy the American way of life before al-Qaeda gets the chance to. They inserted language into a defense budget bill (a way of essentially blackmailing legislators into a yes vote) which would allow American citizens arrested on American soil to be detained indefinitely in military custody. In other words, it would essentially invalidate the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.

As one commentator put it: People in Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria have engaged in revolutions to replace these undemocratic and unjust practices.

There's one other country that engaged in a revolution to get rid of arbitrary arrest and detention without trial or charge: the United States of America.

Reflections on 9/12

On this eve of the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, The New York Review of Books re-ran an excellent essay (from 2003) by Joan Didion. In it, she explores the ways in which Americans did far more damage to our own society in the post-9/11 period than al-Qaeda ever could.

Bigotry today! Bigotry tomorrow! Bigotry forever!

Regular readers will know that I am a staunch supporter of equal treatment under the law for all citizens, including based on sexual orientation. In short, I believe in the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. That gays should have the same civil rights as other law-abiding Americans seems a no-brainer to me. And it isn’t just that I support civil rights for gays. It’s that, for all the heated rhetoric, I’ve yet to hear a single compelling argument against it. Not even necessarily one I agree with... just one that I think isn’t completely ludicrous.

Not everyone thinks that way.

My friend Bob over at Planet Albany blog has a report on a march in Albany against equality for gays.

I want to preface my remarks by saying I do not know for sure what Bob’s position is. I have never heard him state his own personal position explicitly. Mostly, he just relays the position of the Catholic Church and other social conservatives which is, of course, staunch hostility toward these civil rights. Given his avowed status as a social conservative and his megaphoning of the Catholic Church’s positions, one can infer his own view but I do not wish to put words into his mouth (a courtesy not often extended in the other direction). Hence, an explicit statement would be welcome.

But to sum up his reporting, here is my take...

-Opposition to civil rights for gays has “religious foundations” (no surprise there) and is a heart rendering example of unity between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims;

-Democratic state Sen. Ruben Diaz, the leading opponent of equality in the New York legislature, has “love in his heart” for gay people... he just doesn’t think the state should treat them as full-fledged citizens. Gay people might have a little less objection to this view if they weren’t forced to pay the same taxes as full-fledged citizens. Maybe Diaz should show his “love” by getting them a tax break. If not, Diaz should understand that I love Hispanics too... so long as they don’t expect any rights;

-Saint Diaz, a Pentecostal minister, doesn’t appear have an actual legal argument for why gays should be denied constitutional rights, at least as reported by Bob, but he does object to people calling him meanie names. Diaz seems to be under the impression that him being a minority gives him license to take discriminatory positions against other minorities and then snivel when he’s criticized for it; bullies usually are the ones most hypersensitive to criticism. Diaz vowed that he is “not keeping his mouth shut” despite the fact that he has nothing of substance to say... though that’s usually the case about those who talk to loudest;

-A speaker from the New York State Catholic Conferences fears the ramifications of the Church having to (gasp) treat gay people decently. The Church might, for example, have to choose between its anti-gay positions and its participation in the adoption industry. Sorry, but that’s a pathetic argument against equality. Equal treatment under the law a constitutional right. Participation in the adoption industry is not. It’s that simple;

-That speaker wrongly claims that Catholic Charities has already been forced to close adoption agencies in Boston and Washington, D.C. In actual fact, they were not forced to close such agencies. What they were actually forced to do is to choose between helping kids and their anti-gay positions. That they chose the latter is sad and telling, but it was their choice and the consequences are on their conscience;

-A “Reverend” Duane Motley implied that tolerance for gay people was responsible for straight people getting divorced and living together unmarried... going so as to invoke the menace of health problems, school dropouts and crime;

-Motley also made the counterintuitive claim that legalizing gay marriage would weaken the institution. It’s more likely marriage would be STRENGTHENED by the inclusion of people who believe so strongly in that institution that they want to participate in it and are willing to struggle to do so.

-Some wonder why there’s a growing backlash against churches who are abuse their tax-exempt status to lobby for the arbitrary denial of rights by the state to citizens based on nothing more than their personal religious whim. Some feel churches should not receive these *SPECIAL RIGHTS*. Here’s why. Churches can get a tax exemption while demanding gays be denied rights by the state... and this tax exemption might be threatened if gays were ever granted equal rights. Gays must pay full taxes even while being denied full rights. The revenue not paid by tax-exempt churches is a burden passed on to all taxpayers, including gays. So the cruelest irony of all this is that gays are essentially helping, against their will, to fund organizations hell bent on making sure they are treated like crap. Churches are benefiting from services paid for by those whose oppression they are committed to. No grounds for resentment there!


It’s unfortunate that religious leaders hide behind their religion to excuse their own bigotry. The Constitution gives anyone, individuals and churches alike, the right to be a bigot; it does NOT give the state the right to act in such a fashion toward law-abiding, taxpaying citizens. The state does not follow religious diktats. This is because (and Bob would certainly agree with this) neither the US nor NYS is a theocracy.

At least opponents of black civil rights in the south tended not to hide their prejudices behind the respectable veneer of religion. They simply came out and said, “We hate (black people) because they are inferior beings.” Ditto for those who wanted to keep treating women like chattel. Such candor may be crude but at least it’s honest enough to drop the intellectually insulting pretense of something loving and holy.

Note: Clearly, this is just my take on the anti-fairness rally. You can judge for yourself by reading Bob’s report directly by clicking here.

Random thoughts

PRIORITIES
The American people had no problem with kidnapping random and sundry foreigners on foreign soil, guilty or not, and “renditioning” them to torturous regimes under the pretext of national security. We had no problem with funding such tortuous regimes with oodles of your tax money (but God forbid we help working Americans get health care). We had no problem with our agents doing the torturing themselves. We had no problem with the horrors revealed in Wikileaks’ Afghan and Iraq war logs (sorry I can’t link to them as Wikileaks’ site curiously appears to be down). Heck, we had little problem with the insane and counterproductive aggression against Iraq in the first place, even after the WMD fairy refused to show us where those weapons were. But we draw the line at airport pat downs and body scanners?

**
NATIONAL 'DON'T USE YOUR BRAIN' DAY
First, there was a national “Don’t Buy Gas” Day protest. Now, there’s a “Buy Nothing” Day. Do people realize how stupid and pointless these one day protests are? Do you seriously think you’re sending a warning to the consumerist economy by refusing to spend a dime on useless crap today but then going out and buying useless crap tomorrow? Is the self-indulgence of empty symbolism really that powerful? If you really want to send a message, don’t change your day. Change your dang lifestyle.

**
ACCOUNTABILITY FOR ONE, ACCOUNTABILITY FOR ALL
If teachers should be held “accountable” via their students’ test scores, shouldn’t corrections officers be similarly held “accountable” via their released prisoners’ recidivism rates?

**

THE JUDICIARY HIJACKED BY THE MOB
So Mike Huckabee is gloating that he and his fellow theocrats helped oust several Iowa Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of equal protection of the law for gay citizens. He claimed that the ruling sent a message.

It sent a message indeed: beyond a certain level, we shouldn't have elected judges.

The system here in New York is fine. Trial court judges are elected. But appellate court judges, those who set precedents, are appointed by the governor and approved by the legislature but to a limited term of office. This gives them a certain degree of accountability but shields them to a certain extent from mob fury.

The judiciary is not supposed represent the "will of the people." It's supposed to uphold constitutions, including minority rights protections, regardless of what the hysteria or scapegoat of the day happens to be.

And it sent another message about why electing judges is dangerous: it lends itself to the same corruption of outside money as the election of politicians.


**

OXYMORON OF THE DAY
New York’s governor-elect wants the judiciary to intervene in a few close election recounts to ensure that we have a “functioning Senate” in January. It’s amusing that he thinks the courts can impose this. Between being run by boobs and criminals (convicted, indicted and not-yet-indicted), NYS hasn’t had a functioning Senate in several years.

**

MONEY WELL SPENT?
The US alone has spent $56 billion on “Afghanistan reconstruction.” For reference, if the US had instead divvied up that money equally and directly given it to the people, that would have put $2000 in the hands of every single Afghan.

**

FORTUNATELY NO ONE EXPECTS COHERENCE FROM SPORTS ANNOUNCERS
Soccer commentators should be thrashed for improper use of the word 'unlucky.' Hitting a shot 15 feet over the cross bar or, worse, out for a throw in is NOT unlucky; it's incompetent. Unlucky is the FC Dallas player who scored the own goal on Sunday night.

**

RADIATING FURY
Last month, Hundreds of gallons of radioactive water from a cleanup at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory spilled from a drainage pipe into the Mohawk River in NY’s Capital District, according to an article in the Albany Times Union. A failed sump pump system caused about 630 gallons of tainted water -- containing Cesium-137, Strontium-90, uranium and plutonium -- to overflow into a culvert draining directly into the river, [the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation] reported.

The T-U described these as ‘known carcinogens.’

I can’t imagine why there’s public reticence about the expansion of nuclear power as an energy source.

Brainwashing children into being civilized... or scumbags

I don’t particularly care what Carl Paladino thinks or says (and I use the word ‘think’ quite generously), even when he’s pandering to one of the most socially conservative groups in the country. Maybe if I swore a lot and insulted everyone I could think of, that might make me qualified to fix the world’s 16th largest economy.

Carl may think ultra-orthodox Jews should set the political agenda, but most of the rest of us believe in freedom and the Constitution. Though admittedly that group doesn’t include the Bronx gang that savagely and methodically brutalized and sodomized a 17 year old they suspected of being gay.

Carl and others seem to forget that while being gay is not a choice, being bigoted certainly is.

I don't want children to be brainwashed into thinking that being a hateful, anti-American scumbag is an equally valid or successful option compared to being a civilized human being.


Update: One of Paladino's opponents, Howie Hawkins, rightfully denounced Paladino's scapegoating and bigotry. Hawkins compared Paladino's comments and the general mood within the GOP to the old Know-Nothing Party of the 1840s and 1850s. Their politics of fear and division scapegoated Catholics and immigrants. Today’s Republicans target Muslims instead of Catholics and people of color, gays, and Latino immigrants instead of Irish and German immigrants.

The heroes of the world

This essay is part of an occasional feature on this blog that presents compelling stories from elsewhere in the world, particularly Africa, that are little reported in the American media. It's part of my campaign to get people to realize there is a lot going on in the world outside the US, IsraelStine and the Trumped Up Enemy of the Month. A list of all pieces in this series can be found found here.

Today is World Humanitarian Day. The date was chosen because it marked the anniversary of the homicide bombing of the UN compound in Baghdad which killed 22 UN workers including former Human Rights Commissioner Sergio Vieria de Mello.

Humanitarian aid workers have always been in harm's way but they are suffering greater and greater numbers of casualties in recent years. This is not down to bad luck but rather to an intentional strategy by warring parties.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Guinea, which at the time hosted one of the largest refugee populations in the world, I made the acquaintance of many humanitarian aid workers. I visited a refugee camp and it gave me some idea of the absolutely miserable conditions these aid workers labor under.

Because of this and other direct interactions, I've come to consider humanitarian aid workers as the heroes of Humanity. The majority of western aid workers are people who could easily have remained at home in comfortable, air-conditioned apartments in London or New York but have chosen of their own free will to go to the worst places in the world in order to feed the starving and heal the sick.

It's also worth remembering that most big aid organizations also rely heavily on staff who are nationals of the countries in question. These are people who could very easily and understandably flee the conflict in their land but choose to stick around and help people who would otherwise suffer in misery or die.

I can think of no more noble calling.

Try acting like a human for a change

I listened to a great segment on the NPR show Fresh Air with Jeffrey Gettlemen, East Africa bureau chief of The New York Times. Gettleman talked about ideology-free "un-wars" that plague places like Somalia and the DR Congo and the massive human devastation they cause. Last month, he published a piece about how the US- and UN-funded Somalia transitional government was conscripting child soldiers to fight against Islamist extermists.

So naturally, the first comment left on the page was:

Tragic shame about the situation in Somalia; but there's a solution: Just deploy Oliver Stone to do a documentary on how it's really a paradise on earth and any negative images are simply the fabrication of the imperialist/capitalist U.S. media. It seem to work in other chaotic hell-bound locations. Send Michael Moore as well, to really put a shine on the situation.

After listening to the piece on the radio, my reaction was one of sadness and disgust at the carnage. Yet, this person's first reaction was to be snide. It was to take a shot not at the disgusting murderers like Joseph Kony or al-Shabab but at left-wing film makers.

Sadly, this is emblematic of our society has devolved. An exploration of tragic human suffering is met not with anger or empathy toward the suffering of other homo sapiens, but only with a shallow political temper tantrum.

When did we Americans become ideologues first, rather than human beings? And is any ideology worth having if it's completely divorced from humanity?

The "omissions, exaggerations and misstatements" of Dick Cheney

You remember the good old days when then-Vice President Dick Cheney was rarely seen or heard? Now that he's no longer holed up in his famous undisclosed location, the as-yet-unindicted former vice-president won't shut up. He's been on a media blitz in recent weeks, launching an impassioned defense of the Bush administration's anti-civilization policies.

If lack of truthiness, as Stephen Colbert would call it, were a legally recognized disability, Cheney could easily get one of those blue handicapped parking spot tags for his limo.

Two journalists from McClatchy offer a detailed analysis of the many "omissions, exaggerations and misstatements" (their words) found in a speech Cheney gave yesterday.

According to the piece, Cheney distorted comments from the director of national intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair to defend "enhanced interrogation techniques" (torture), even though Blair said there was no evidence that such techniques were necessary.

Cheney's often claimed that torture has saved American lives. Strangely, he did not quote from the CIA director general or from the FBI director who both said there was zero evidence to back up such fantasies.

Cheney claimed that revealing torture techniques would allow America's 'enemies' to better prepare their combatants, even though Adm. Blair approved the release of the torture memos because they would be prohibited under Obama and because "we do not need these techniques to keep America safe."

The piece also pointed out that some of the most critical information about the 9/11 attacks were obtained from the very first al-Qaeda operative captured; the information was obtained through 'traditional' (civilized, non-torture) methods. The agent who obtained the information told a Senate subcommittee that the use of torture "was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against al-Qaida."

Cheney stated "the key to any strategy is accurate intelligence." A strange comment considering how much Cheney and other far right neo-cons relied on dubious information supplied them from Iraqi exile groups to mislead the public into supporting the aggression against Iraq. Even back in Machiavelli's time, they knew not to trust the exiles. I'd be surprised if Cheney really cared at the time if the information was accurate. He knew it served his purposes.

Cheney claimed that only "ruthless enemies of this country" were kidnapped and sent to secret prisons. A 2008 McClatchy Newspapers investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to U.S. officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.

Cheney claimed that after 9/11, the administration had to take seriously "dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists." The last State Department report on international terrorism to be released before Sept. 11 said Saddam's regime "has not attempted an anti-Western terrorist attack since its failed plot to assassinate former President [George H.W.] Bush in 1993 in Kuwait." And according to a Pentagon study released last year, Saddam's security services had "no direct operational link" with al-Qaeda.

Is Cheney willfully dishonest or so self-delusional as to be that divorced from reality? Anyone can speculate but only he knows for sure. But at least former president George W. Bush has had the grace to fade quietly into the sunset without harming America's reputation any further.

Justice for dummies

Germany recently arrested and charged an alleged former Nazi with running a death camp in the 1940s.

Cambodia is putting on trial senior Khmer Rouge members for torture committed in the 1970s.

A Peruvian court convicted and sentenced to a quarter century in jail its former president Alberto Fujimori for widespread human rights abuses in the 1990s.

The United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone is currently trying former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor for hideous war crimes and crimes against humanity also committed in the 1990s.

If these entities can hold to account former heads of state for human rights abuses committed decades ago, then why can't US officials prosecute those who authorized secret torture sites, torture more generally and any of the other violations of American and international law okayed only a few years ago by the US government during the so-called war on terror?

Sadly, some in power and their apologists are more concerned with 'not giving the Republicans any ammo' than re-establishing America's respect for civilized values and the rule of law.

Third world countries and the supposedly incompetent UN are mature and decent enough to apply justice and the rule of law. Certainly the self-described Greatest Nation on Earth and Leader of the Free World can hold itself to at least a high a standard.

Barbarians inside the gate

Next time Dick Cheney or barbarians like him claim that torture (or whatever euphemism they prefer) is 'necessary,' remind him of this...