Sacred Disorder | Cliff Bostock's blog – 'Finally, I came to regard as sacred the disorder of my mind' (Rimbaud)

Greenwald’s chilling description of the U.S.

As anyone who knows me personally knows, I am a huge fan of Glenn Greenwald, the former constitutional lawyer turned author and blogger for Salon. Unlike the usual pundit, Greenwald questions everything, does the investigative work journalists are often too lazy to do these days, and has a talent for seeing the bigger picture.

Today, his blog features a brilliant piece about the way the Washington Post editorial page postures grandly about Russia’s violation of “the rule of law,” while it has consistently backed George Bush in his own violation of domestic and international law. The following two paragraphs are particularly startling in their description of what America has become:

What we’ve done over the last seven years — at least much of it — isn’t a secret. It’s worthwhile to state frequently in clear, dispassionate terms what our country has done. Our Government has kidnapped people off the street and from their homes and sent them to places like Syria to be tortured for months (including completely innocent people) and then invoked National Security claims to bar them from holding our Government accountable in a court of law. We’ve disappeared others into secret prisons beyond even the reach of the Red Cross, or encaged them in a lawless black hole on a Cuban island. We’ve tortured them, sometimes to death, even with the knowledge that many were innocent. We attacked and completely demolished another country that couldn’t attack us even if it wanted to. And our President openly declared that he has the power to break our laws, spy on U.S. citizens with no warrants, and indefinitely imprison even our own citizens with no process of any kind. Those are all just facts that aren’t really subject to dispute or debate.

Worst of all, having done all of that — not for weeks or months following the 9/11 attacks, but for years, still — we’ve collectively decided, without much turmoil or debate, that it should all be forgiven, that none of it should be punished or even investigated, that it’s best just to keep these crimes concealed and, when accidentally disclosed, to immunize the criminals. And all of that is being done right out in the open, so that our formal human rights reports are self-evident, almost laughable, farces, and even countries like Zimbabwe, when their governments want to engage in tyrannical acts, can and do rationally point to the U.S. as the leading example which they’re following.

Read the entire post here.

Oh, by the way, Greenwald wonders what allows the Post’s editorial writers, like many members of the political class, to point a finger at other nations’ transgressions of human rights while legitimating our own. It’s cognitive dissonance.

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