Eloquent Thinking about Torture

Here are some elqouent things I just read about torture:

My friend Don Brown, in response to his reading of J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year.

Two posts (first and second) by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo.

Mark Danner's second article in the New York Review of Books. (Here's the first one.)

As for me, my line remains the same: put the guys on trial (guys = people you arrest for terrorist crimes AND the people who ordered that they be tortured).

[Still waiting to get my new computer fully operational. Once I do, I'll get the Daily Poem Project back up to date!]

"We do not fucking torture!"

Shepard Smith (about whom, being an expat, I know nothing) sums it all up for me here:

"We are America! I don't give a rat's ass if it helps. We are AMERICA! We do not fucking torture!!"

If you are an American and you want to know what your government was doing in your name, read Michael Danner in the New York Review, among other things. It doesn't get more explicit than this.

What absolutely enrages me is that the Bush administration took people who should have been tried on dozens of criminal charges and, by torturing them, made it impossible for them to be given proper trials. And then they turn around and say, "See, we need military tribunals to try these guys!" That's so circular it makes my head spin.