Thursday, October 04, 2007

Conservative Andrew Sullivan now calling Bush Administration War Criminals


Andrew at Atlantic Monthly:
A couple of things need to be stressed, because I've learned the hard way that intelligent people simply refuse to absorb what is staring them in the face, when what is staring them in the face is so staggering:
Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics.
There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?
When a reader tries to explain the American people will do nothing, we are all war criminals now, Andrew Sullivan continues:
When conservatives subvert the rule of law ... to enable torture, and when only one man gets to decide who gets detained and tortured, they are no longer conservatives. They are fascists. And they need not just to be defeated; they need to be repudiated.
"Ah, what does he know" say his critics. He quit being a Bush supporting Republican conservative when he slowly realized they would never accept his gay. Andrew feels betrayed over the torture which he at first believed and claimed was left-wing lies and exaggerations.

Sadly, Andrew is learning that never have so many permitted such few fanatics wrapping themselves in the flag and God talk to shred the Constitution and dishonor America so much.

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