Secret prisons, torture - what is America becoming?

[NNN0LHI]

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070613/OPINION04/706130326/-1/OPINION

THE CIA is being blasted in Europe on two fronts. The first is at a trial in Milan, Italy, based on the agency's practice of "extraordinary rendition." The second, related to the first, is a report by the Council of Europe revealing secret prisons the agency maintained in Poland and Romania.

Neither the rendition - moving CIA prisoners from one country to another where they might be questioned by interrogators prepared to use torture - nor secret prisons outside the United States, are new. What is new are several other elements. The first and most important is that the populations of the countries involved, and their governments and the international community, are no longer sympathetic to U.S. policy. snip

This started to change with the end of the Cold War. The 9/11 attack on the United States restored some of the inter-intelligence service cooperation that made rendition and secret prisons possible, given the sense that the United States and country "X" were pulling together in the war on terrorism.

What soured the relationships with the other governments and intelligence services was the expansion by the Bush Administration of the so-called war on terrorism to include the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

America's erstwhile allies were ready to help combat the people who attacked us on 9/11. But they, like most Americans now, realized that the administration's false premises for the Iraq war - Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and the absence of a link between Saddam Hussein's government and al-Qaeda - didn't hold water or perhaps were deliberate deceptions. They began to disassociate themselves from U.S. policies.

[mikelgb]

1. it is becoming what they want it to be

it is a new American century my friends

[Jack Rabbit]

2. It is becoming everything we were told was bad about the Soviet Union

[H2O Man]

3. When I was

a boy, I once heard basketball great Bill Russell say, "Pick your enemies carefully, because they are the ones that you'll come to most closely resemble."

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. It's becoming a crumbling empire grasping at the straw of brute force.

Overextended, dependent on rebellious client states, economically failing, being challenged by serfs it employed, morally bankrupt, and under the control of corporations with no loyalties except their own self-interest.

On the bright side, disintegration may bring about a number of new countries, none of which will be "Super Powers" and can afford to serve their citizens rather than the ruling class.

[hootinholler]

5. It's worse than that...

We exploited NATO treaties to establish these prisons.

-Hoot

[Karenina]

6. ...

Is anything different? :shrug:

[Javaman]

7. Becoming? has become. nt