Oh! how our hearts leapt when we read this in
Whatever it is I’m Against It:

Poor, poor Gonzo. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, who cannot find a job, is writing a book for which he cannot find a publisher.

The grubby little man still doesn’t get it. At all. We followed the link to find this:

“What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?”

John Yoo, of course, is not suffering, as he ought. Nor are Rumsfeld or Cheney. Nor is Douglas Feith who got himself a plum job at Georgetown University, “as a Professor and Distinguished Practitioner in National Security Policy, for a two year stint despite strong objections from the student body and faculty. His contract was not renewed due to strong opposition from members of the faculty…” But he’s got another job with the Republican wing-nut think tank, the Hudson Institute.

Speaking of torture, 3 Quarks Daily reviews an article which seems to ask the right question. All this time the Bush and proto-Obama administrations have been struggling with the question, “Yes, but if we close Guantánamo what do we do with the inmates?” The much more pertinent question is, “What do we do with the torturers?” That doesn’t mean just the waterboarders but also those who advocated and defended torture and raised legal justifications for, or obfuscations of, torture.

The detainees will disperse to various places around the globe or be caught up in the American prison system. But the torturers will take their attitudes and moral justifications, their psychological states and sometimes distress back into the mainstream of the military establishment and civilian society. Those who commanded, authorised and supported what they did remain untouched and so that mindset is unchallenged and unpunished and therefore, in effect, validated in the political/military establishment as appropriate policy for consideration and an appropriate attitude towards “others”.

That is, the damaging effect of torture on American civil society is going to be far greater than its effect on individual detainees and the cost far greater than any hoped-for gains in national security.

In the same way, the greatest cost to America of the war in Iraq has not been the billions or trillions of dollars that have been spent, or the human cost in the lives of dead soldiers, but the well-documented effect on the country of the return into American society of the hundreds of thousands of physically and psychologically wounded soldiers who have survived and returned.

IN OTHER NEWS….

It is fantastic that Sarah Palin’s daughter, Titty…no…Nork…no…Bazooka…no, don’t tell me…Bristol, that’s it, Bristol, has named her new son after an Australian cricketer.

Yes, Bristol and Levi’s new baby is to be called Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston. (Okay, so she got one too many Ts in Johnson, but hey, this is the Palin family we’re talkin’ about.) Tripp obviously after Linda Tripp, the notorious destroyer of Democrat Bill Clinton re the Lewinsky romance; Easton possibly after the brother-and-sister Australian political duo. So what a wonderful tribute to Australia – perhaps because Sarah safely knows that Australia is the only continent that is both a continent and a country – even though she can’t even see it from her front porch!

[tags]Gonzo, politics, government, Gonzalez, Yoo, Bush, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Clinton, Guantanamo, terror, terrorism, Iraq, war, Australia, cricket, Mitchell Johnson, Palin, Sarah Palin, Bristol, Tripp, Tripp Easton, Linda Tripp, Monica, Lewinsky, Mitchell Johnston, sporting values, Australian sporting values, political values, Australian political values[/tags]