Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Full Circle

Today President Bush gave an address at the dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington D.C. Not surprisingly, after running through a list of communist atrocities, he made sure to mention this century's equivalent, terrorists:

Like the Communists, our new enemies are dismissive of free peoples, claiming that those of us who live in liberty are weak and lack the resolve to defend our free way of life...

Now it seems pretty clear to me that this is a reference to, among other things, "enhanced interrogation techniques". Maybe not explicitly, but in the sense that people who support their use would probably include them in any list of things that reflect our strength and resolve in the fight against terror. Maybe they formulate it like Bush's terrorists, that opponents of torture are weak and lack resolve, but the meaning is the same.

Either way, what's important to remember is that in order to put these techniques into practice, that is, in order to show the terrorist suspects we'd captured that we had the necessary resolve to torture them, we used the same Soviet-era prisons in Poland and Romania that created the victims Bush was memorializing today. Go figure.

Posted by Judah in:  Global War On Terror   Human Rights   

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