It's hard to believe it's been 15 years! 15 years ago I was blogging about Abu Gharaib and Torture. 15 years later and none of the perps, except the useful idiot reservists who were caught on camera, and a Reservist General who had been frozen out of supervision, have been punished. On the contrary, the perps from them are in the Trump admin! Anyway what I was writing then is as true then as now. And the fact that nobody was punished is part of the lead in for why this is an issue now. Indeed the David Cole article I cited then contains a warning for now:
“history suggests that what the government does to foreigners in the name of national security it will ultimately do to citizens as well. The Palmer Raids were directed at foreigners, but their architect, a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover, was not content to stop there. He devoted his career to seeking out ways to extend those tactics to citizens, and in the McCarthy era, he succeeded. In fact, every significant form of political repression that the government has used against citizens began as an anti-alien measure.” [No More Roundups/WaPo]
In this day of Donald Trump, where we still haven't even rectified the abuses we committed against Muslim immigrants 15 years ago, this is a current issue and real threat to all of us.
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