What They Do and What They Say, Part II

Today's Bob Herbert column hits the nail on the head regarding ultimate culpability for the War on Terror prison abuses. Referring to report from Physicians for Human Rights that examined the use of psychological torture by Americans against detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Cuba, Herbert writes:

"People have been murdered, tortured, rendered to foreign countries to be tortured at a distance, sexually violated, imprisoned without trial or in some cases simply made to 'disappear' in an all-American version of a practice previously associated with brutal Latin American dictatorships. All of this has been done, of course, in the name of freedom.

"This insidious and deeply inhumane practice was not the work of a few bad apples...the abuses flowed inexorably from policies promulgated at the highest levels of government."

High-level government officials, Herbert notes, who embrace a "culture of life."

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And while several junior enlisted and officer personnel have faced courts martial over prison abuses, the highest-ranking government official to receive censure is Janice Karpinski, who was demoted one pay-grade, from brigadier general to colonel.

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Don't Miss Big Sister!

Ann Coulter will be on Joe Scarborough's MSNBC show tonight, arguing against liberal bias in federally funded public broadcasting. Her argument will no doubt be the standard right wing rant--PBS and NPR should either eliminate the bias or stop accepting federal funds.

Ann won't point out that while the government funds public radio and television to the tune of $387 million, it wants to spend well over ten times that amount--as much as 48% of the proposed $2.5 trillion proposed federal budget--on the military and "defense" related items in 2006.

I'm a lot more concerned with what the government's doing with our military than I am over whether or not PBS and NPR are "biased."

Ann Coulter's the perfect mouthpiece for the radical right. She goes to show just how far a pretty gal can ride on a sixth grade sense of humor and a broomstick.

JLH