The Invisible Opposition to Empire, Zionism & Democrats

From Lynndie England to Shaq

Democrats Sink Deeper into the Ooze

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Away to prison for three years goes Lynndie England, her pleas for mercy ignored by the military judge in Fort Hood, Texas. So who are the penalized thus far to indicate America's revulsion over the systematic use of torture by its own forces? It tots up to a handful of rednecks.

Scot-free go those who inherited a secret system of torture that goes back decades and who ensured that its relentless and widening application would soon bring the practice to light. The framers of the policy go free. The lawyers who gave torture its new garb of legality plump themselves down in richly endowed chairs at our most esteemed law schools or are rewarded with seats on the Supreme Court. The senior military officers, who ordered the use of dogs, isolation cells smeared with filth, water-boards and other techniques designed to drive their captives mad, have escaped all sanction, except for the eloquent reproofs of Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. The lumpen intellectuals, like Jonathan Alter and Alan Dershowitz, who clamored for torture need fear no indictment or downtime on the cable networks.

If there was a real party of opposition, maybe those who mandated the new torture system would face some sanction. If Democratic Party leaders had made an issue of it, some fiber would have been given to the calls for punitive sanction of the engineers and administrators of the torture systems. But top Democrats were silent. Torture was not an issue in the Kerry campaign. And the grunts were abandoned as surely as Kerry abandoned the rednecks of Appalachia and the working poor across America.

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