No Torture, No Exceptions

by matttbastard

In the wake of September 11, the United States became a nation that practiced torture. Astonishingly-despite the repudiation of torture by experts and the revelations of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib-we remain one… . What once was shocking is now ordinary.

Steve Xenakis, Peter Bergen and Carl Ford discuss the essays they wrote for a special issue of The Washington Monthly (PDF here) that calls upon the US to end its current pro-torture policy.

Related: Justine Sharrock has more on the impact ambiguous US interrogation policy had on soldiers who served in Iraq and became unwitting participants in a real life Stanford Prison Experiment.

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“Two Hours of Obama Bashing”

by matttbastard

Hmm–sounds like Mike’s boy might be trying to opt out of his contract. Also, I don’t think Gretchen Carlson really wants to delve into the subject of double standards. She just wants to drop a retaliatory ‘n’-bomb on Obama (“OMG so not fair!!11″)

Yep, this is about as deep as the National Conversation About Race™ (aka “WTF Obama’s Black?!!1) gets on Fox & Friends.

More from HuffPo and Think Progress.

Update: John Amato isn’t buying Chris Wallace’s newfound journalistic ethics:

[B]eing kind of cynical about FOX, I wonder if Wallace is speaking out because he’s been crying that Obama won’t go on FNS.

Considering the positive reception Wallace’s remarks have received from the Obama campaign, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the junior senator from Illinois show up on Fox News Sunday in the near future.  Let’s just hope he considers the consequences of dealing with the devil. (Ease up, kids–that was a Marlowe reference, not Nation of Islam rhetoric.)

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Unsustainable Mythology

by matttbastard

Anti-racist activist Tim Wise slices through the bullshit re: Jeremiah Wright’s “controversial” sermons with surgical precision:

What Jeremiah Wright knows, and told his flock–though make no mistake, they already knew it–is that 9/11 was neither the first, nor worst act of terrorism on American soil. The history of this nation for folks of color, was for generations, nothing less than an intergenerational hate crime, one in which 9/11s were woven into the fabric of everyday life: hundreds of thousands of the enslaved who died from the conditions of their bondage; thousands more who were lynched (as many as 10,000 in the first few years after the Civil War, according to testimony in the Congressional Record at the time); millions of indigenous persons wiped off the face of the Earth. No, to some, the horror of 9/11 was not new. To some it was not on that day that “everything changed.” To some, everything changed four hundred years ago, when that first ship landed at what would become Jamestown. To some, everything changed when their ancestors were forced into the hulls of slave ships at Goree Island and brought to a strange land as chattel. To some, everything changed when they were run out of Northern Mexico, only to watch it become the Southwest United States, thanks to a war of annihilation initiated by the U.S. government. To some, being on the receiving end of terrorism has been a way of life. Until recently it was absolutely normal in fact.

But white folks have a hard time hearing these simple truths. We find it almost impossible to listen to an alternative version of reality. Indeed, what seems to bother white people more than anything, whether in the recent episode, or at any other time, is being confronted with the recognition that black people do not, by and large, see the world like we do; that black people, by and large, do not view America as white people view it. We are, in fact, shocked that this should be so, having come to believe, apparently, that the falsehoods to which we cling like a kidney patient clings to a dialysis machine, are equally shared by our darker-skinned compatriots.

As they say, read the whole goddamn thing.

h/t Racialicious

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