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Pennsylvania Primary Day!
By Ned | April 22, 2008
I totally forgot that was today until this morning’s newspaper kindly reminded me, giving me a strange mixture of relief and nausea. Relief, because it’s one more state I’m not going to have to read about for a solid month before their primary, and nausea because the Pennsylvania Primary is kind of like a bad hangover the morning after primary season would normally have ended. The whole “bitter” mess didn’t do a whole lot to detract from that perception.
In that spirit, here are two news items that you’re going to hear absolutely nothing about today:
The Bush administration has been engaged in a massive propaganda campaign to manipulate the American media for years. The DC press corp, perhaps unsurprisingly, doesn’t seem to give a shit.
Speaking of hangovers, Guantanamo detainees are alleging that they were drugged as part of their interrogation. I’m torn here - disgusting intrusion on their human rights, small step up from being waterboarded, or both?*
Check out the special cameo in that article!
Yet the allegations have resurfaced because of the release this month of a 2003 Justice Department memo that explicitly condoned the use of drugs on detainees.
Written to provide legal justification for interrogation practices, the memo by then-Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo rejected a decades-old U.S. ban on the use of “mind-altering substances” on prisoners. Instead, he argued that drugs could be used as long as they did not inflict permanent or “profound” psychological damage. U.S. law “does not preclude any and all use of drugs,” Yoo wrote in the memo. He declined to comment for this article.
Well that’s okay. Maybe the Pentagon has another marionette WaPo could interview about this.
*Unless they were being drugged and waterboarded, which is likely. But think about how depressing it is that when this news broke, a reasonable reaction was, “Well, it’s not quite as bad as some of the other shit they’ve been doing over there.”
Topics: Civil Liberties, Corruption, Terrorism, The Media, The White House |
September 14th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
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