ACLU: Hypocrisy?

The ACLU defends the rights of the people, not the rights of government functionaries. There is nothing selective about the support for civil liberties offered by the ACLU.

Detainees who have had their rights denied need the ACLU to help defend their rights under the constitution. Government agents already have the power of the government behind them – there is no need for the ACLU to defend them, because they are authorized agents of the state, and are not being prevented from exercising their civil liberties.

The ACLU is currently working on collecting information on the torture and illegal detention of persons under CIA and other programs. The persistent efforts of the ACLU have helped to make clear the depth and extent of illegal activity perpetrated by the previous administration, and may well lead to prosecution of administration apologists who issued legal opinions to authorize plainly unconstitutional activities.

GOP retrenching

Colin Powell represents what the Republican Party could have been if it had stuck to the rule of law and properly administered the government. That opportunity was wasted, but driving him from the party is nothing but a gift to the left. He was one of the few principled and respected Republicans left - that’s why he could not endorse McCain-Palin.

Independents are the only way to win elections - if even Colin Powell cannot be accorded a conscience, then woe be to the party. It will indeed be a long road home.

Levity on Torture

Pardon the levity. True torture is, in fact, a serious issue. In the few instances where torture was committed — Abu Ghraib, for instance — the United States was correct in punishing the culprits. But that was an exercise of individual juvenility and cruelty, not official, state-sanctioned intelligence gathering of high-value targets.

This paragraph leads me to believe that you have not familiarized yourself with the nature of the activities carried out under Bush. The documents that are publicly available clearly show that torture was an exercise of official, state-sanctioned power, in direct violation and contravention of the law. Torture was used with official approval from the highest levels of the government, despite valid objections that it was illegal. True torture is a serious issue, and torture with direct approval from government agents demands punishment for the culprits.

We will never have a mature national discourse regarding proper interrogation and what does and does not constitute torture until we can differentiate between the two, embrace the “slippery slope” dilemmas as necessary points of contention, and move past the slanderous pastime of political posturing.

There is not a debate about what constitutes proper interrogation, and what constitutes torture. These are well established categories, which the Bush administration knowingly and wantonly violated. Claiming that the techniques are not torture is simply ex post facto justification for illegal activity. There may be some debate about the details, but there is clear evidence that torture was used under direct authorization from the Executive, and the government must be held accountable for this activity.