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October 26, 2005
Letting CIA employees torture people
WashingtonPost.com has an article following up on the Bush administration threat to veto an anti-torture amendment. Apparently:
The Bush administration has proposed exempting employees of the Central Intelligence Agency from a legislative measure endorsed earlier this month by 90 members of the Senate that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoners in U.S. custody.
It strikes me that this sort of thing might go through quietly if it were coming from another administration. The Bush administration is no doubt reflecting something close to the naturally prevailing approach to this area of national security.
Even in the rule of law there's a threat of coercion. Once you build that in, the end always justifies the means, doesn't it? There's a Führerprinzip right in the middle of it.
When I look up fascism in my Gnome dictionary client, I see:
A political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government; -- opposed to democracy and liberalism.
So fascism is, for example, what you have at work. Democracy would be:
Government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is retained and directly exercised by the people.
Liberalism gets me:
Liberal principles; the principles and methods of the liberals in politics or religion; specifically, the principles of the Liberal party.
The thing is, democracy is also:
Government by popular representation; a form of government in which the supreme power is retained by the people, but is indirectly exercised through a system of representation and delegated authority periodically renewed; a constitutional representative government; a republic.
In other words, it's theoretically what we have. What is the word for a system where coercion is absent? (I think it's anarchy, but the 1913 Webster's didn't like anarchists.)
Posted by Mark at October 26, 2005 09:16 PM
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