War and Piece will never quote the Wall Street Journal again
14-Nov-2005Quite right too.
WSJ editorial board comes out for torture. I wish I had 100 WSJ subscriptions to cancel. Appalling and history’s scum. I will never post another WSJ story here. Ever. Even their website outreach guy sends me about 3 emails a day with their stories. Save it for the the pro-torture media. Can we get the WSJ advertisers to sign off on the next batch of Abu Ghraib photos to be released? Maybe there are particular techniques they’d like to weigh in on? Yes on humiliating and degrading, no on organ failure? Yes on child rape and using guard dogs on detainees, no on holding the chain of command responsible? Yes on gulags in Eastern Europe? I’d like to hear the advertisers weigh in on what they think seems reasonable and how they’d like to be associated with the forthcoming releases.
Update: Rereading this editorial, the content is so awful, but it’s written in that typical let’s be reasonable, contrary to what you’ve been hearing and taught at church, the kind of torture we’re doing is really the only way to win the war. Honestly, this one should be saved for the history books, like those photos of lynching, about a low point in American history. The WSJ editors should truly be ashamed of themselves. And I hope the advertisers are ashamed of their association with such views that do not befit a first world country, or a democracy.
A previous War and Piece post helps set the scene:
I was in a torture chamber once, in the basement of a police station in Kosovo days after it was abandoned by Serb forces defeated by Nato. It was hideous as you would imagine. The British soldiers who were with me were equally shocked. A lot of the instruments and interrogation drugs I saw there also suggest they were not designed to cause organ failure or death in their victims, just pain and terror, as Mr. Cheney and his office mates suggest is what they are going for in terms of legal wiggle room. And like Mr. Cheney and his office mates, Mr. Milosevic and his Serb troops didn’t seem to overly concern themselves with the Geneva conventions, until it was a bit late. Having laid my eyes on what such a scene looks like, I just associate such activities with the forces of not only the pathological and depraved, but those who are headed for defeat. If you’ve seen it, you realize in a way that’s hard to explain, it’s the tactics of the losers. If Cheney and his office mates haven’t had the experience, perhaps they should. And I really don’t think it’s inconceivable that the remote possibility of the Hague may lie in some of their futures. Things change fast when they do, as history shows, and they could find their current willing protectors eventually chucked from office, and a whole new climate at home and abroad.






The war and piece article seems to have been truncated.
Alastair | 14-Nov-2005The war and piece article seems to have been truncated. Only the first sentence remains.
It *has* been truncated. I wonder why.
Chris | 15-Nov-2005It *has* been truncated. I wonder why.