It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
Mother Davis tries out a tongue twister as she relates,

Republicans used to tease President Bill Clinton for his precise use of language. Now, it appears that the Republicans in the White House directed their lawyers to find ways to twist definitions of ordinary, unambiguous words.

For example, most people understand that torture is defined as the use of pain as a form of coercion.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld didn't think that this simple definition should apply to their own actions. So, they ordered lawyers, including one lawyer reporting directly to Dick Cheney, to create a report for Donald Rumsfeld, that would invent new definitions for the word "torture", thus allowing American soldiers to conduct torture of prisoners without having to actually call it "torture".

As documented by the New York Times, these lawyers wrote in their report that the Bush Administration would not call America's torture "torture" if a soldier states that he or she "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective". So, if American soldiers electrocuted a prisoner, knowing that they would cause severe pain to the prisoner, but claimed that the electrocution was not conducted for the purpose of inflicting pain, presto chango, - the Bush Administration would not call it torture, and would call it perfectly legal.

Bill Clinton twisted language to describe an act of private consensual sex. George W. Bush ran operations of lawyers to twist the language used to describe government-sanctioned torture. To me, that summarizes the difference between the Clinton White House and the Bush White House quite nicely.

Wondering if it's torture when soldiers says that they're sorry,
Mother Davis

Posted by Katherine Davis at 11:54 AM. # (permalink)  




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