Posted by Sigismund on June 11, 2008, at 16:12:51
In reply to In the US House of Reps yesterday, posted by caraher on June 10, 2008, at 21:28:30
Our previous government never said what it felt about the rendition of Mamdou Habib. I imagine they felt that with a name like that, rendition from the streets of Pakistan to torture in Egypt was to be expected. They knew all about it.
From "Black Mass Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia"
"The ferocity with which liberal societies have treated their enemies cannot be explained in terms of self defense alone. Liberal societies are worth defending, for they embody a type of civilised life in which rival beliefs can live in peace. When they become missionary regimes this achievement is put at risk. In waging war to promote their values actually existing liberal societies are corrupted. This is what happened when torture, whose prohibition was the result of an Enlightenment campaign that began in the eighteenth century, was used at the start of the twenty-first as a weapon in an Enlightenment crusade for universal democracy. Preserving the hard won restraints of civilisation is less exciting than throwing them away to realise impossible dreams. Barbarism has a certain charm, particularly when it comes clothed in virtue."
and
"The Iraq war has served an economic system that forbids long term committments. In the casino capitalism that prevails in the early twenty-first cntury, investment has been replaced by gambling, and it will surely not be long before the war is written off as just another bad debt. Even the wealth that has been extracted in the occupation has a spectral quality. If there is a symbol that captures America in Iraq, it is not the colonial institutions of former times. It is Enron, which vanished leaving nothing behind."
poster:Sigismund
thread:834071
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20080312/msgs/834191.html