Josh Marshall looks at the Taguba Report and sees a pattern of legal abuses that starts with the corrupt system we adopted at Guantanamo:
I can't think of a more tangible example of the corrosive effect our embrace of lawlessness at Guantanamo has had on our conduct. First we devise these outlandish rules to deal with the worst bad guys behind 9/11 and the next thing you know we're applying those brave new rules to miscellaneous bad actors who fall into our net in Iraq. What are we looking at here but the fraudulent connection between Iraq and 9/11 suddenly become flesh, as we look into our own faces and see a paler shade of our enemies looking back at us?
This has a disturbing echo in what Philip Zimbardo, one of the principal investigators in the infamous Stanford prison study, had to say in the Times today:
"It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches."Posted by Chris at May 6, 2004 07:36 AM