Interrogation smileys

I'm sorry I'm not more skilled or, in fact, motivated to make this graphic more legible, but you can find it via Phaedo. It's part of an interrogation diagram...a real U.S. government one. Not a parody, despite appearances to the contrary.

Here are some close-ups:









The chart is part of a larger document that contains the text you see on Phaedo's site: "Visit the database every time you spend time with any of our esteemed guests. Tell the database about what fun conversation you and your guests had."

I saw it in the LA Times Sunday story about medical professionals and Abu Ghraib torture (more on that in the next post), and truly, I did not believe it was real. I had to go hunt it down, and even now I am having one of those "at any moment I will wake up and this will all have been a very bad dream" experiences.

I was already a bit over the edge when I tracked down this latest atrocity. The prospect of Gonzo as our AG has me feeling desperate about the state of things. Andrea reminded me of my own line (first articulated in reference to something completely different), "The camel's back broke a long time ago. You're just realizing it now."

"Think of who he's replacing," she said. I argued that Ashcroft, while Satanic, was only a minion to the Devil compared to Gonzales, who seems high-priestlike to me. "He's just differently evil," she said. I disagreed.

The thing about this administration and this moment in history that's so shocking to me is the brazenness of our venality, our lack of apology about our own reign of terror at home and abroad. I am not a naive person; any of us on the left know about horrors of Vietnam perpetrated with a wink and a nod, but it wasn't written into policy and, were it, we wouldn't be considering the architect of the policy for Attorney General. Shit, in the Reagan era when that band of crooks completely circumvented democratic process, they put up Ollie North as a fall guy and all shook their heads in dismay over his actions, happy to have a lone gunman. Now no one even feigns remorse or a basic level of respect for human rights. Bring back the sham! I want to at least believe they know that what they've done is wrong in someone's eyes, if not their own. All of which led to Andrea identifying me as "a liberal in the best sense of the term" because I still believe in the rule of law.

And I do. I wrote a whole goddamned dissertation about the Constitution. I can tell you, our republic is legitimized by the law. That's the platform upon which we've built our nation. And why? Because we did not have the already-legitimizing foundation of birth or religion. That's why the Constitution begins "We the People"; in reading it, we assimilate ourselves into the republic--we move from being private people with individual concerns ("interests" in the words of the oft-misunderstood founders) to rights-bearing citizens.

All of which is to say I really do think we're fucked, folks. But more on that note tomorrow.