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April 23, 2009 3:22 pm
Nobody involved in interrogation and torture from George Bush and Dick Cheney down, did it for pleasure, for personal gain of for political power. They believed that they are acting for defense of United States. Although this motivation cannot be justification of wrongdoing, it still must be borne in mind. The most that an inquiry would find is that a lawyer or a number of lawyers prepared an opinion which was motivated by a wish to comply with the desire of their superiors and acted contrary to proper interpretation of the law. If this becomes a criteria for being a lawyer, most probably the whole profession will disappear. Already the public rates the legal profession below used cars salesmen. Whatever are the findings of this inquiry, the learned colleagues will not sink any lower. The public is less interested in this inquiry than it was in the details of what, when and how President Clinton did what he did to Ms. Levinsky and other women and how he lied about it to Hilary and the nation. The late Nobel prize winner Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his short essay following translation to Polish of Thomas Merton's Elegy for Ernest Hemingway, that one has to be as thick skinned as an elephant to stick with American Conservatives, but the lack of historical imagination of the Liberals irritates him. In my mind the torture controversy illustrates his point. — Aharon Meytahl, Vestal, New York
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