Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Do Iranians read the WaPo? Let's hope not

Because if they do, Glenn Greewald points out, they'll have justifications for everything they do.

Seems the Post feels we should go into talks with Iran demanding they clean up their act with regards to due process and torture. As Greenwald says:
So we're supposed to roll into these negotiations righteously complaining about Iran's "obvious lack of due process." For the last eight years and counting, we've been imprisoning tens of thousands of Muslims around the world with no charges of any kind. Keeping people who have never been charged with any crime shackled in orange jumpsuits and locked in cages for years on a Cuban island has become our national symbol. Just yesterday, the Obama administration demanded that a court rule it has the power to abduct people anywhere in the world, ship them to Afghanistan, and keep them indefinitely imprisoned there with no trial of any kind -- which is exactly what we've been doing for years and still are (in a dank and nasty prison which happens to be right over Iran's Eastern border). Our current President just recently advocated and is currently devising a scheme of so-called "preventive detention" whereby he'd be empowered to lock up people indefinitely for crimes they might commit in the future. We continue to abduct people from all over the world and ship them to third-party countries for interrogation and detention ("renditions") without any pretense of due process. And right over Iran's own Western border, we not only continue to occupy Iraq, but maintain prisons in which thousands of people are imprisoned by our military without any charges of any kind -- including an Iraqi journalist who works for Reuters who was ordered released by an Iraqi court yet continues to languish in an American prison in Iraq, merely one of numerous foreign journalists we imprisoned for years, in Iraq and elsewhere, with no charges at all.
And the WaPo's editiorial and op-ed pages are filled with admiration and approval, and justification, for all of it. In fact, they recently fired Dan Froomkin, the one columnist they had who consistently called for investigation.

One has to wonder how they function with such massive cognitive dissonance. As long as We do it it's okay? Or even if We do it it is by definition Good because We are, by definition, the Good Guys?

Labels: , , ,

2 Comments:

At 6:27 PM, September 16, 2009 Anonymous Anonymous had this to say...

Good Lord! I didn't fully realize how badly Obama's been doing on this issue. I can't discern any difference between him and W on this matter. Wasn't he saying something, oh, about a year ago, about "change we can believe in?"

 
At 7:33 PM, September 16, 2009 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

Yes. With this sort of thing, his commitment to faith-based initiatives, and reluctance to fight for the public option, plus his waffling on DOMA - well, he's managed to be a much bigger disappointment than I feared. Which makes me sad - and more than a little bit angry.

 

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

     <-- Older Post                     ^ Home                    Newer Post -->