The New Gestapo

Cheney looking comfortable while visiting Auschwitz


PBS' Frontline broadcast last night, 'Cheney's Law', was utterly jaw dropping in its reporting of the "dark side" of the Cheney/Bush collaboration to undermine the U.S. Constitution and the freedom of not only Americans, but the entire world. I'm still in shock from the assault on my sensibilities and the horrific damage done to our system of government portrayed in this stunning documentary. If you have not seen it, do so now. If you are not frightened by the depth of secret police-like tactics and operations of Cheney's decisions since in power, you are asleep. The parallels between Hitler's SS and the Gestapo are uncanny and terrifying. Watch it.

The Good Americans

Frank Rich swats another one out of the park with his essay 'The Good Germans'. How much longer will it take Americans to figure out how dangerously close we find our selves to being 'Good Americans'?

By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques have a grotesque provenance: “Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.

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