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.


 
Reason #1190 to Boot Bush:

In a report drafted for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the final days before the invasion of Iraq, Bush Administration lawyers were tasked with developing justifications of the use of torture. The report rings with enabling passages such as "In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign . . . (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in chief authority." The parenthetical comment is in the original report.

Another bon mot in the Bush Administration document: "Sometimes the greater good for society will be accomplished by violating the literal language of the criminal law.... Without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president's ultimate authority." In other words, it's OK for the President to break the law.

Donald Rumsfeld classified the resulting document, which provided a specific list of defensible techniques, making the final version of the report off-limits to the American public until 2013.

Justify torture. Put the president above the law. Hide it from the public. Haven't we had enough of this sort of amoral leadership? (Source: Wall Street Journal June 7, 2004)


Posted by James Cook at 2:16 PM. # (permalink)




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