Sometimes words are simply insufficient
to express the horror and shame one can feel.
That does not even come close to describe what i felt when a friend passed on a link, i opened it, and read From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington's man behind brutal police squads in The Guardian. The subtitle on the web page does not give you the full impact, but will point you at what to expect:
That does not even come close to describe what i felt when a friend passed on a link, i opened it, and read From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington's man behind brutal police squads in The Guardian. The subtitle on the web page does not give you the full impact, but will point you at what to expect:
In 2004, with the war in Iraq going from bad to worse, the US drafted in a veteran of Central America's dirty wars to help set up a new force to fight the insurgency. The result: secret detention centres, torture and a spiral into sectarian carnageIf one believes what the article offers - and given the track record of the paper for accuracy in reporting I do - what we did, with the apparent blessing of important figures including the likes of David Petraeus, is a national shame.I am not by nature a vindictive person, as those who read me here regularly know, yet I found myself, after
Maureen Dowd takes apart Dick Cheney
in a column titled Repent, Dick Cheney, in today's New York Times, Dowd examines a forthcoming documentary on Showtime titled “The World According to Dick Cheney,” produced by R. J. Cutler, she says of the man she calls "America’s most powerful and destructive vice president" that he
woos history by growling yet again that he was right and everyone else was wrong.This is not Dowd in her usual snarky mode, although there are lines of snark, but rather the sharp-witted Dowd determined to portray Cheney accurately, as he in effect presents himself in the documentary.She lets Cheney, who was a raised in a Democratic family in Wyoming, explain that it was the anti-war protests against Vietnam he saw in Madison Wisconsin while doing doctoral studies that turned him conservative, and then frames it in an inescapable fashion by writing
Maybe if he’d paid more attention to the actual war, conducted with a phony casus belli in a country where we did not understand the culture, he wouldn’t have propelled America into two more Vietnams.Please keep reading.
