Reply #166: No Other Way To Say This: Torture Memos Reveal Fascist Mentality

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http://www.crisispapers.org/essays/fascist.htm

No Other Way To Say This: Torture Memos Reveal Fascist Mentality
June 17, 2004
By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

Conveniently buried in the all-Reagan-all-the-time news coverage last week was the smoking-gun revelation, in the so-called torture-memos, that the Bush Administration was actively engaged in setting up a governmental system where Bush becomes the sole law of the land. In this set-up, no court, no legislature, nobody can touch him. He is to be the Supreme Leader.

There's no other way to say this, even though it pains me to acknowledge it: what is revealed in these torture memos are the foundations for a kind of fascist rule in America. The object was (and is) to establish Bush as an extra-constitutional dictator, under cover of "law." You'll understand in a moment why there are quotation marks around that word.

Here's a quick reprise of how we got to this place. After 9/11, when suspected terrorists and Talibanists wouldn't talk at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo, the Bush Administration set their lawyers a mighty task: find a way to justify the torture of prisoners for the purposes of extracting information, but in a way that will not put the torturers or those who authorized the torture in any legal jeopardy under existing American anti-torture laws and international anti-torture conventions and treaties.