Yet more torture

More horrific news from The New York Times about US soldiers torturing people. I'm sorry to do this to you, but here's a taste.

At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend. An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling.

"Leave him up," one of the guards quoted Specialist Claus as saying.

Several hours passed before an emergency room doctor finally saw Mr. Dilawar. By then he was dead, his body beginning to stiffen. It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

There's lots more, it's very bad, and I think it's important for clear-eyed Americans to read it. Or at least the bits that Digby at Hullabaloo excerpts in his post about the story.

And when you're up for it, read what Jeanne at Body and Soul has to say.

We've gone mad. And it makes me afraid, considering what Abraham Lincoln said in his greatest speech.

if God wills that ... every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Indeed. Just recently, I found myself saying in another forum

I advocate taking the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons, letting everyone out of them, leveling the buildings, salting the earth where they stand --- and sending everyone involved in the military chain of command, all the way up to the President of the United States, to the Hague to stand trial for war crimes. Because nothing less will undo the propaganda coup we have handed to al-Qaeda. That's doing what's necessary. War and torture and dismantling our civil society are taking the easy way out, by comparison.

But seeing this most recent news, I dread that even if we had the strength to turn away from torture, to repudiate it, to accept the justice of the International Criminal Court, we have simply gone so far that we can not come back.