How seductive to hear Lord Cheney--a man who chose not to serve his country in battle out of, as he admits, pure self interest--decree that now we must "work" the dark side, when what he really means is we must "serve" the dark side.

Must. Must we? We must. Why? Because the enemy has decreed it is so. And so did the enemy within cede the biggest victory al Qaeda--the enemy we created with billions of taxpayer dollars--will ever win: our soul as a nation. No small victory, either, considering that we ourselves have been fighting over since our founding, paying dearly with hundreds of thousands of civil war dead.

But just like that, one man says we now have one fucking guy who says we have to torture (with the world on our side and the world's law enforcement organizations at our service) and one or two extremely creative but apparently not very competent lawyers to write memos saying it's all okay, our guys can inflict anything that will not immediately lead to death (oops--I guess "pulping" a man's legs, as was done to an innocent taxi driver in Abu Ghraib--can cause death, um, our bad) is legal.

And like that, the ideal that, if we didn't always attain we could at least say we aspired to, was no longer something we cared to live up to.

And the terrorists won.

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Personally, I don't expect you to (or care if you do) believe me. But you really should take this guy's word for it:

[en.wikipedia.org]

[www.newyorker.com]

Go ahead. Educate yourself.

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[www.amazon.com]

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