It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of
a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into
privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing
algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the
planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.
These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times. Now Newsweek chimes in with an independent report corroborating Seymour Hersh's revelations in the New Yorker: George W. Bush, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld and Steve Cambone actively generated, against opposition from more modeate elements, the secret system for detentions and interrogations under which these instances of torture occurred. Bush partisans will say that by examining these facts, journalists like Hersh and the three-person team at Newsweek are not supporting the troops. Bush campaign voices will say that by reading these articles and talking about them, we're spitting on American soldiers and calling them baby-killers. Ignore that distraction: While George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and the gang try to pin the blame on the grunts on the ground, these news pieces actually demonstrate the contrary. Primary fault does not lie with a few "bad apple" soldiers who came up with this torture on their own. Whether they should have done so or not, they were following orders. No, primary fault lies with the civilians who designed the new apparatus of indefinite detention and torture of "ghost prisoners." Their names: Bush. Ashcroft. Rumsfeld. Cambone. Return to the Irregular Times Main Page
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