The National Security State as a Criminal Enterprise

[rhett o rick]

The National Security State as a Criminal Enterprise
By Tom Engelhardt

“It came from the top and that’s never been a secret. The president authorized the building of those CIA “black sites” and the use of what came to be known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” and has spoken of this with a certain pride. The president’s top officials essentially put in an order at the Department of Justice for “legal” justifications that would, miraculously, transform those “techniques” into something other than torture. Its lawyers then pulled out their dictionaries and gave new meaning to tortured definitions of torture that could have come directly from the fused pens of Franz Kafka and George Orwell. In the process, they even managed to leave the definition of torture to the torturer. It was a performance for the ages.”

“The Bush administration was, of course, helped in those years by a media that, when not cheerleading for torture, or actually lending the CIA a helpful hand, essentially banished the word from its vocabulary, unless it referred to heinously similar acts committed by countries we disliked.”

“And in case you think it’s all over but for the shouting, think again, as Rebecca Gordon, author of Mainstreaming Torture, writes today in “American Torture: Past, Present, and… Future?””

Read the complete article: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/12/15/national-security-state-criminal-enterprise