Wednesday, August 02, 2017

The woman meets a torture enabler


In the George W. Bush Justice Department in the mid-2000s, Steven Bradbury was one of legal advisors who offered spurious justifications for U.S. torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Tammy Duckworth was an Army reservist who was shot down in the helicopter she was co-piloting and lost her legs in Iraq.

Today Duckworth is a U.S. Senator from Illinois and as a member of the Commerce Committee she was in a position to speak her mind to Bradbury as Trump tries to recycle the disgraced lawyer into his administration in the Department of Commerce.

You were an architect of the legal justification for detainee abuse in the form of waterboarding ...that alone should disqualify you for future government service. ... your willingness to aid and abet torture demonstrates a failure of moral and political character. ... in one of the policies you justified, detainees were sleep deprived for up to 180 hours (that's seven days), forced into stress positions, sometimes shackled to the ceiling, subject to rectal hydration ... confined in boxes the size of a small dog crate ... one man became completely unresponsive with bubbles rising form his open mouth ... another man was frozen to death. ... Brutality once sanctioned by the likes of you is not easily contained. ...

... You lack the judgment to stand up and do what is morally right when pressured by the president of the United States.

The whole clip is worth watching. We seldom get this level of truth-telling and justified indignation from our elected officials.
Our Democratic women senators -- Hirono, Harris, Warren, Duckworth and even on good days the old timers like Feinstein -- are delivering admirable, moral, inside resistance to the Trump shitshow. Those of us on the outside have to thank them when they do the right thing and have their backs when they are attacked.

1 comment:

joared said...

Thanks for sharing this -- I either missed it in news or it didn't get the news exposure and prominence it should have with all the other revelations in the building DT scandals.