So-called War-on-Terror?
Both houses voted to wrest control over W.O.T. detainees from the executive branch this week, this business of waterboarding and secret C.I.A. prisons and whatall having become just too embarrassing to ignore. Here’s a few choice items:
The Washington Post not only had a nifty little report on the
House’s support for a torture ban, it also provided a link that lets you see how your reps voted on the torture bill.
Not only that, but they give you the tally by state, party, sex, and, in a flight of media-slutty fancy, astrological sign.
Pisces and Leo were the clear winners in the anti-torture heats, opposing torture by factors of 4.5 and 4.33 respectively. Geminis turn out to be the thumbscrew people, opposing torture by a factor of only 1.35.
Meanwhile, the Senate, as the NYT reports,
. . .is poised to approve a measure that would require the Bush administration to provide Congress with. . .regular, detailed updates about secret detention facilities maintained by the United States overseas, and to account for the treatment and condition of each prisoner. . .Another measure included in the bill. . .would require the White House to provide classified intelligence documents on Iraq that have until now been withheld from Congress.
The NYT got feisty, too, referring to this, the McCain amendment and other signs of Congressional rebellion as a sign of lawmakers’ “unease” with the techniques being used in “what the administration calls its war on terrorism. ”
The big news here is that the NYT is no longer willing to agree that what this administration is conducting is, strictly speaking, a war on terrorism. It could be a war on something else, like, say, the Geneva Accords, or Democracy, or truthfulness. Or, maybe it isn’t a war at all, but more like an psychotic assault at the edge of a lonely pond on terrorism, or a spoof on terrorism in which we imitate everything terrorists do in order to show them how silly it looks. The New York Times isn’t saying. All they’re saying is that we don’t necessarily buy this “war on terror” thing you guys in the White House are pushing.