October 15, 2007
The Gestapo...
Posted at October 15, 2007 4:07 PM in
National Politics
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Republicans
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I now officially declare a moratorium on Godwin's Law with respect to the Bush Administration, thanks to this tidbit from Frank Rich of the NYT today:
By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”
Some parallels to the Nazis are just extreme, like using "Lebensraum" to describe Israeli settlements on the West Bank, but what scares me about things like the reference above is that I don't think that these guys are smart enough to be students of the Gestapo. They came up with this shit on their own.
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