I got your Bill of Rights right HERE!
One of the most disheartening and disgusting displays of cover-your-ass flippancy has to be Vice President Cheney's assertions that torture helped keep us safe from post-9/11 terror attacks. That odious meme has been picked up, of course, by what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the FCM - Fawning Corporate Media - to help bolster the dodgy idea that at least the Bush Administration got something right in eight grueling years of corrupt incompetence.
Cheney probably is more interested in laying the groundwork for his defense against any future war-crimes and malfeasance warrants, and our shattered surrogates in London, Madrid and Mumbai may question just what we mean by "safe". But acceptance of this claim is testament to the still-virulent fear of terror attacks, magnified now since our Mideast incursions have spread Islamic radicalism, in the opinion of this country's top intellligence analysts. We don't have to worry only about the candidate martyrs who hated us on Sept. 10, 2001 - now, thanks to unfathomable missteps by the Decider, we must fret about blowback.
To anyone who's been living at the bottom of a coal mine during our long, demented War on Terror, blowback is the unintended - and breathtakingly violent - consequence of our own action. British commuters got a horrific taste of that in the summer of 2005, when that country's decision to be our empire-building helpmate blew up in the faces of stunned customers using London's transit system.
But when any nation goes forth seeking foreign dragons to destroy - and plant its flag on distant, bountiful shores - there's another kind of blowback. This is one is... homegrown. It trickles down to us from the rarified atmosphere of our own leadership, from the power locus of our own government.
