Fiat Lux

One of the reasons why I'm blogging less about politics these days is that I feel an overwhelming sense of my own uselessness. Nothing I say is going to make BushCo actually have to pay the price for the various outrages they've pereptrated.

Take the torture issue, for example. It will be no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, but the NY Times is runing an article today showing that, in fact, Abu Ghirab was not an isolated case of a few rogue soliders, but rather part of a broad pattern of abusive behavior that began at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and spread from there. The FBI knew what was going on, and at least some cases was none to happy about it. But they were unable to have an impact on the process.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last spring, officials characterized the abuse as the aberrant acts of a small group of low-ranking reservists, limited to a few weeks in late 2003. But thousands of pages in military reports and documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to the American Civil Liberties Union in the past few months have demonstrated that the abuse involved multiple service branches in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba, beginning in 2002 and continuing after Congress and the military had begun investigating Abu Ghraib.

For example:

In late 2002, more than a year before a whistle-blower slipped military investigators the graphic photographs that would set off the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, an F.B.I. agent at the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, sent a colleague an e-mail message complaining about the military's "coercive tactics" with detainees, documents released yesterday show.

"You won't believe it!" the agent wrote.

Two years later, the frustration among F.B.I. agents had grown. Another agent sent a colleague an e-mail message saying he had seen reports that a general from Guantánamo had gone to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmo-ize" it. "If this refers to intell gathering as I suspect," he wrote, according to the documents, "it suggests he has continued to support interrogation strategies we not only advised against, but questioned in terms of effectiveness."

Read the rest of the article. It's an ugly, ugly story, but I am completely sure that the only people who will ever pay a price for this gross and unethical abuse of power will be low-ranking soliders and perhaps one or two mid-level officers. The people who formulated and approved this policy will never have to do anything worse that perhaps make a statement to the prress that any abuses were not intended and are regretted.

Of course, we ALL pay a price when terrible things are commited in the name of America. But BushCo doesn't seem to care about that.

So as I said, it's been harder for me to feel like blogging about politics. Why should I bother? Nothing I can say or do is going to change things. The best I can do is try to add one more small voice of outrage to the chorus and hope that somehow it's going to help.