Yea, and the CIA was doing what it's doing now, and the US military in Vietnam, etc. An early radicalizing experience for me was AJ Langguth's series on Dan Mitrione as a torturer and trainer of torturers in Uruguay, later written up in his book Hidden Terrors.
But it wasn't open official policy, that makes a difference. You didn't have judges and AGs and presidential candidates defending it in public. You didn't have TV shows glorifying torture and torturers instead of making them out be the worst kind of villains. You didn't have civil libertarian law professors calling for torture warrants. And you didn't even have the kind of people who made of of a president because of his equivocations of what constituted "sex" or the the meaning of the word "is" themselves equivocating on whether certain unspeakable activities constituted "torture" in the legal meaning of the term.
In fact, you didn't even have those things (or the equivalent) in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia -- the victims disappeared and nothing more was said. There is a scary thought for you. In a sense we've descended below their depths, not in scale, of course, the number of victims in those regimes was far greater than under ours, but in unashamed, open-
> And there were
> far greater violations of civil liberties in the
> past too - Lincoln
> suspending habeas corpus,
and arresting the entire Maryland legislature! Of course that is a fantasy many of have had with regard to the state legislatures of many states. The Illinois state legislature actually does get arrested on a regular basis, though not all at once, for bribery and extortion.
Wilson & Palmer banning
> magazines from the
> mails, Palmer's raids. Let's not get carried away
> with the alleged
> novelty of the Bush years.
>
> > In fact, a country
> founded on slavery and
> genocide can hardly plumb fresh depths, can it?
>
That's what I used to think. But we're learning what it is like to be ruled by people who really have no bottom whatsoever, no constraints or restraints, no limit, no shame.
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