None Dare Call Us Sane

This article by Jules Siegel on Alternet reviews the book: Guantanamo: What the World Should Know by Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray and asks: Thus Ends Democracy in the United States?
If anyone, after reading this, still thinks Bush is a man of God and fighting a just war than your definition of ‘man of God’ and ‘just war’ is about as twisted as W’s syntax, Clinton’s definition of ‘sex’, Ms. Rice’s definition of ‘integrity’ and Gonzales’ definition of ‘torture’. And if you are not absolutely for certain sure that all of your opinions are the same as Bush’s, you can never be absolutely for certain sure that it won’t be you one day given the right to defend yourself in a secret interrogation cell but not in an open court room.
Even if torture could be justified in some rare instance like the ‘ticking bomb’ hypothesis, it could never be justified under these conditions:
Thousands rounded up willy-nilly and packed by the hundreds like sardines into shipping containers (shades of Auschwitz) with only fifty out of those hundreds surviving the transport (shades of the slave trade). The shooting of extra breathing holes into the containers thereby killing more whose corpses go along for the ride. And surely someone along the line of decision makers could have made the judgment that a ninety-plus year old man who cannot walk without a walker could be safely ruled out as a potential terrorist and at the very least needn‘t be shackled to his walker! Same goes for the very young boys and men who showed signs of mental incapacity.
The shame of this episode of our history will be on us for generations. We have forfeited the right to be thought of as the moral leader of the world. We are no longer the shinning beacon of freedom, democracy, civil rights, equality before the law or justice. And the only reason the majority of Americans still seem to think so is because the definitions of those words have been tortured into inanity by the pundits, propagandists and the media which tolerates the misuse of words in forums that are billed as the rational, objective, and impartial imparting of the facts. Thereby creating an illusion that we all now live within. So that none who still know the original meaning of the word ’sanity’ dare call us sane.