The Morality is Save the Most Powerful

What is the operative definition of morality for this Bushie administration? Be santimonious about issues which seem to protect the innocent, but come down hard on the powerless without knowing or caring if they are innocent or not. It is a morality of exquisite cynicism, designed to appeal to the worst in everyone: selfishness masked by denial.

There is so much that is basically immoral about the Iraqnam debacle that to single out the worst is difficult. But high on the list must be the utter disregard for people whose only crime might well be that they are powerless. Not only has the Bushie government indiscriminately swept up people into prisons in Iraq and Cuba (along with suspects who might be legitimate if they worked a little to prove it), and kept them imprisoned without trial or even charges, but now they apparently want to make permnanent incarceration without charge a policy. There hasn't been a greater threat to basic human rights in the democratic West for more than a century.

The idea that you keep some bad guys from doing harm while the odds are you are unjustly imprisoning a lot of innocent but powerless people is the mark of cowardice, as well as the injustice of totalitarianism. All for dubious political insurance, and out of sheer arrogance, fear, contempt and laziness.

In effect you are declaring war against your own people in order to protect them. But of equal importance, you are affirming the terrorist analysis that in America only the powerful matter, and the way to challenge American power is to go after it with equally effective violence. That's the inevitable effect of a policy that says that justice and rules of conduct come a distant second to naked power of the most powerful and arrogant but apparently most cowardly.

With a policy like this, stated or unstated, it's time to call Guantanamo by its correct name: an American concentration camp.

Top News Article Reuters.com

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