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Thursday, June 14, 2007
Today we're going to show how the right-wing is playing directly out of the Soviet Union playbook.
That should be something to throw in their face, huh?
Nothing, probably not even the Iraq War itself, has soured world opinion on the United States, as much as the Bush administration's embrace of torture.
Actually, something probably has: the Bush administration's denial of that embrace, and its attempt to redefine what constitutes torture, and call what they're doing enhanced or alternative interrogation techniques.
I've always been under the impression -- and maybe I've been hoodwinked about this, I'm curious if you've been under this impression as well -- I've always been under the impression that our intelligence agencies developed these alternative interrogation techniques specifically to be able to make the dubious claim, that they don't torture.
In other words, we wanted to be able to assert that these are good old-fashioned American, high tech, humane, proper methods of interrogating prisoners that fully comply with the Geneva Conventions, the anti-torture treaty, and all other applicable domestic and international human rights obligations.
How could anyone dare to challenge these methods, when we thought them up just to avoid torturing people?
Well, here's a bombshell for you to drop on your friendly local right-winger.
We didn't develop these techniques at all. They come straight from the KGB, the Cold War Soviet Union's secret police.
It turns out, that the right-wing has been defending, endorsing, even singing the praises of, Evil Empire torture techniques.
As confirmed by a recently declassified report by the Defense Department's own inspector general, the Bushians "reverse engineered" the Soviet techniques for use by American interrogators.
For all the details, listen to the podcast.
(PS: Right-wingers, if you want to write in to me, fine, but at least do me the courtesy of listening to the podcast first. Please don't respond just on the basis of the brief preview above. Thanks!!)
For those who aren't familiar with podcasts, podcasts are a series of mp3 audio files that you download to your computer or portable music device (iPod or other) and then can listen to whenever you want.
You don't need an iPod to listen to podcasts.
Podcast software like iTunes will automatically check a podcast at intervals you specify, and download any new installments.
iTunes is free and very easy to use. http://www.apple.com/itunes/
In iTunes, if you want to subscribe to my podcast, just click on Advanced at the top right, then choose Subscribe to Podcast, and paste in the URL http://feeds.feedburner.com/blasttheright
That's the URL to use for other podcast-friendly software programs as well.
Alternatively, you can just manually download new episodes from my podcast home page as they become available. Here is a link to my podcast's home page: http://www.therationalradical.com/podcast.html
Enjoy!!
Jack Clark 9:48 PM [+]
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