All's fair in lies and war

By Capt. Fogg

What a great thing it is that Joe Lieberman never found his way into the White House.

"We have to allow the president to allow the toughest measures to be used when there is an imminent threat to our country,"

he said yesterday.

"If we've got somebody that we think can tell us where a nuclear bomb is planted in an American city, then I want the president to be able to authorize that to be used."

Of course that's not the circumstance under which it has been used or is likely to be used and if that were the case an exception would always be made. No victim of US torture whether at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or in our secret dungeons anywhere has ever had any remote connection with a nuclear plot and much of the extracted information has been dangerously false.

Lieberman I'm afraid, is just another scare monger and panic pimp for the fascists who have taken over our government. What we have used it for has been to develop a case for having arrested someone. As John Stewart pointed out the other night, we tried and executed Japanese officers who waterboarded prisoners and in fact we did attack Japan and we did nuke them and the torture was done in the name of avoiding their destruction.

It's just another way for pious, Sabbath observing Lieberman to express his sense of America's divine purpose to dominate; a purpose which transcends the morality of the religion he flaunts. It's just another case of his and the administration's opinion that whatever we do is OK because we, like the Japanese and the Germans, are at war. We're at war with anybody we pick up on the street for any reason. We're at war with anyone we say we're at war with and anyone who talked to anyone or might talk to someone or sent an e-mail to his uncle Al Schneider in Al Abama.

Terrorists terrorists! We're at war! And if freedom and justice and sanity and our very humanity gets trampled in the panic, so much the better. Isn't it time we started calling them what they have always been -- fascists? Secretly examining all our e-mail, our faxes, our phone calls, and torturing us if they "think" we might know something or someone, and punishing us if we object - it's terrorism - it's fascism -- what the hell else do you call it? Isn't it time we had the kind of guts Keith Olbermann shows. Time to stop being the mewling cowards we're told to be and call them what they are?

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)