...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Thursday, June 10, 2004
      ( 9:59 AM )
 
Group Project

Digby lays it all out. Even more frightening than the actual conclusion of the Torture Memo that said George W. should have the power to do an end run around all treaties and laws and allow torture:

It's the fact that a group of people working together from all different parts of our government came to this conclusion apparently without serious controversy.

I can't get past the fact that this is the product of a "working group" of lawyers, all of them highly educated, presumably intelligent, decent hardworking Americans who love their country. And, not one of them resigned their post rather than participate in creating a legal justification for torture. And, it was not just an abstraction to them; they went into great detail about the precise amount of pain that was to be allowed. There are long passages in which the meaning of "severe pain" is discussed, the effect of long term mental damage is assessed and where the justification of the infliction of long term damage is defined as a matter of intent rather than result.

[...]

These people who set about legalizing inhumane behavior on behalf of a president on whom they confer absolute power to order it at will are as shallow and evil as the cliché spouting president who demanded it. The slippery slope to totalitarianism started in a conference room where coffee and donuts and microsoft power point presentations on torture and pain were on the agenda one morning.

Read Digby's whole post. It's worth it. Then, after you read it, use your critical thinking skills. These are the skills you inately have because you are curious to know the truth and you want to find out answers to these questions:

Who makes decisions and who is left out?
Who benefits and who suffers?
Why is a given practice fair or unfair?
What alternatives can we imagine?
What is required to create change?

We already know that Bush and the higher-ups in this administration do not employ critical thinking when making life and death decisions. The frightening thing is that there are normal, working people - like these attorneys in this workgroup - that are willing to put aside the critical thinking they were trained to use and instead delve into the deepest moral morass that can be imagined.

In the finest Reagan tradition, the Bush II White House is practicing Trickle Down Theory - except what's trickling down is the corruption of souls.

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