The evidence is conclusive.
A handful of men without shame and without conscience—and without good judgment, it would seem—have led the United States into a series of humiliating scandals that blemish the nation's reputation for model civilized behavior.
It was revealed this week that our nation's government is engaged in a culture of inhumane conduct once confined to the dank, brutal torture chambers of butcher tyrannies.
Just when it seemed the conduct of this administration couldn't possibly get worse, it has.
This comes on top of a military attack on another nation based on what at the very least was egregiously faulty intelligence. It comes in the middle of an investigation on the unmasking of a CIA agent for what looks like political revenge. It comes on the heels of disastrously poor government responses to hurricanes that struck the southern part of the country.
It creates another crack in the confidence of Americans in our own government. It raises deep and troubling questions about who Americans are and what we have become.
Revelations that the CIA is using prisons of onetime Communist Eastern Europe for secretly holding and interrogating terrorist suspects are unspeakably contrary to U.S. standards.
And, there's more. Vice President Cheney even is demanding that Congress exempt the CIA from standards of humane treatment of prisoners—in other words, to consider permitting torture. It's a request so desperately repugnant it deserves instant, certain, loud and unanimous rejection by our senators and representatives.
U.S. government lawyers as well as senior military officers, who fear captive Americans could suffer revenge treatment, oppose Cheney's quest for legalizing torture in foreign lands beyond the oversight of Congress. They oppose his request for the same reason that throughout its history the U.S. has rejected torture.
This is no way to try to win a war already bungled by arrogance and incompetence.
