Crimes and Misdemeanors
Filed Under Human Rights, Commentary | Posted on July 16, 2007
James Ford’s post, “Possibly the Greatest Threat to the Republic“, led me to search for the Hendrik Hertzberg New Yorker article that was quoted in James’ post. It’s a pull-no-punches, tell-it-like-it-is critique of the damage done to human rights, the Constitution, and the moral fabric of the United States by our current vice-president, Dick Cheney.
This is slightly off-topic from my usual ruminations here, but I just felt like it was worthy of sharing, so I’m sharing it. The quote published on James Ford’s blog is powerful; I’ll quote the following paragraph here:
More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of “cruel,” “inhuman,” and “degrading” treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: “a no-brainer for me”), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.
Even better, why don’t you read the complete article here?
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