Freedom Rider To Torture Apologist

by digby

This is exactly why so many Democrats want to defeat Holy Joe Lieberman:

Student Kevin Miner, who said he’d voted for Lieberman twice in 2000, said one question had been eating him up for a long time: “I want to know what the moral reasoning is from a man who went from being a freedom rider to a torture apologist. I want to know what happened.”

[…]

Echoing Republican arguments, Lieberman told the student: “We’re at war. It’s hard for a lot of people to understand this, because it’s a different kind of war.” The people we are capturing are “enemy combatants,” and in many countries are given fewer rights than prisoners of war. “We are now giving them more rights than prisoners of war get in most countries of war.”

“I know it’s fasionable to say what you’re saying,” Lieberman told the student. But ” And it doesn’t mean that they aren’t human beings … But they don’t deserve the same rights that citizens of the United States do.” The comment garnered a smattering of applause.

He echoes George W. Bush’s talking points perfectly, talks down to his constituents as if they are idiots and says the constitution and unalienable human rights are merely “fashionable.” Apparently, Holy Joe and his child predator friends get to decide which people “deserve” them and which ones don’t. (Big of him to acknowledge that the prisoners are human beings, though.)

But just in case some blowback happens — you know, a few innocent people get tortured and locked up forever, Holy Joe issues a little disclaimer with his mindless fearmongering: “these are people who people working for us suspect of wanting to kill us. All of us! Any one of us!”

He knows exactly what he’s saying and that’s more unforgiveable than some wingnut rube who says outright that all the people in Guantanamo are terrorists. Joe’s not actually making the decision to torture and imprison potentially innocent people, you see. “Somebody who works for us” is. And like the immoral Republican he is, that means he isn’t responsible if that person captures somebody who had nothing to do with anything and then uses torture to extract a confession for which the prisoner has no legal recourse to protest or recant.

It’s always somebody elses fault.

Perhaps Lieberman should hear from a Democrat who actually knows what he’s talking about regarding the war on terror beyond this puerile, pants-wetting nonsense about people trying “kill all of you!” Wes Clark was in Connecticut today with Ned Lamont.

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