read it with VL, Pynchon's _1984_ intro & Playboy Japan interview....

[pynchonoid]

...and it's a strong rebuttal against those few
p-listers who used this forum to promote Bush's War...

http://www.moveonpac.org/goreremarks052604.html/
Remarks by Al Gore
May 26, 2004


[...] Our founders understood full well that a system
of checks and balances is needed in our constitution
because every human being lives with an internal
system of checks and balances that cannot be relied
upon to produce virtue if they are allowed to attain
an unhealthy degree of power over their fellow
citizens.

Listen then to the balance of internal impulses
described by specialist Charles Graner when confronted
by one of his colleagues, Specialist Joseph M. Darby,
who later became a courageous whistleblower. When
Darby asked him to explain his actions documented in
the photos, Graner replied: "The Christian in me says
it's wrong, but the Corrections Officer says, 'I love
to make a groan man piss on himself."

What happened at the prison, it is now clear, was not
the result of random acts by "a few bad apples," it
was the natural consequence of the Bush Administration
policy that has dismantled those wise constraints and
has made war on America's checks and balances. [...] 

President Bush set the tone for our attitude for
suspects in his State of the Union address. He noted
that more than 3,000 "suspected terrorists" had been
arrested in many countries and then he added, "and
many others have met a different fate. Let's put it
this way: they are no longer a problem to the United
States and our allies." 

[...] It is now clear that their obscene abuses of the
truth and their unforgivable abuse of the trust placed
in them after 9/11 by the American people led directly
to the abuses of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison
and, we are now learning, in many other similar
facilities constructed as part of Bush's Gulag, in
which, according to the Red Cross, 70 to 90 percent of
the victims are totally innocent of any wrongdoing.

The same dark spirit of domination has led them to -
for the first time in American history - imprison
American citizens with no charges, no right to see a
lawyer, no right to notify their family, no right to
know of what they are accused, and no right to gain
access to any court to present an appeal of any sort.
The Bush Admistration has even acquired the power to
compel librarians to tell them what any American is
reading, and to compel them to keep silent about the
request - or else the librarians themselves can also
be imprisoned.

They have launched an unprecedented assault on civil
liberties, on the right of the courts to review their
actions, on the right of the Congress to have
information to how they are spending the public's
money and the right of the news media to have
information about the policies they are pursuing.
[...] 

Under the Patriot Act, Muslims, innocent of any crime,
were picked up, often physically abused, and held
incommunicado indefinitely. What happened in Abu
Ghraib was difference not of kind, but of degree.

Differences of degree are important when the subject
is torture. The apologists for what has happened do
have points that should be heard and clearly
understood. It is a fact that every culture and every
politics sometimes expresses itself in cruelty. It is
also undeniably true that other countries have and do
torture more routinely, and far more brutally, than
ours has. George Orwell once characterized life in
Stalin's Russia as "a boot stamping on a human face
forever." That was the ultimate culture of cruelty, so
ingrained, so organic, so systematic that everyone in
it lived in terror, even the terrorizers. And that was
the nature and degree of state cruelty in Saddam
Hussein's Iraq.

We all know these things, and we need not reassure
ourselves and should not congratulate ourselves that
our society is less cruel than some others, although
it is worth noting that there are many that are less
cruel than ours. And this searing revelation at Abu
Ghraib should lead us to examine more thoroughly the
routine horrors in our domestic prison system. [...] 


	
		
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