Scumbag Alert…

…on Bill Kristol, founder of the Weekly Standard, for arguing for the Medal of Freedom to interrogators who took part in an act of torture. h/t Sullivan:

One last thing: Bush should consider pardoning–and should at least be vociferously praising–everyone who served in good faith in the war on terror, but whose deeds may now be susceptible to demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points. The lawyers can work out if such general or specific preemptive pardons are possible; it may be that the best Bush can or should do is to warn publicly against any such harassment or prosecution. But the idea is this: The CIA agents who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the NSA officials who listened in on phone calls from Pakistan, should not have to worry about legal bills or public defamation. In fact, Bush might want to give some of these public servants the Medal of Freedom at the same time he bestows the honor on Generals Petraeus and Odierno. They deserve it.

Right, lets give the Medal of Freedom who at best were complicit in an immoral and illegal act handed down from superiors (not probably prosecution worthy, Kristol is correct there, but worthy of its own amount of shame) and at its worst are sadistic amoral crooks.

What’s is even further ridiculous about Kristol’s accusation is that he is creating a false witch hunt. No one has so far proposed prosecution against the grunts, but only against the White House and higher-ups who would of ordered those actions in the first place (even those legally, those complicit to torture are up for prosecution). Its clear now, that memos were provided to the CIA from the White House approving torture. In the past too, it was Bush White House officials and Army representatives who left the grunts hanging out to dry in Abu Ghraib. Lynndie England and others involved in torture (and possibly homicide) after all were referred to as “bad apples” and Bush had pretended that such torture tactics were not endorsed from on high or that at the very least, that national guardsmen and army recruits were grossly underprepared for controlling the prison populations.

I suppose that this wouldn’t be the first time someone complicit in torture was given the Medal of Freedom, George Tenet of the CIA, who has been named in White House memos connected to torture, was given the Medal of Freedom. Yet, at Bush’s last granting of this medal, he also gave it to Tom Lantos, a Jewish Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust, who spent his life campaigning for human rights. It is this kind of hypocrisy that dilutes the honor meant to be bestowed.

Kristol, its clear, has clearly gone off the deep end, and if others really believe we should be giving medals to the kind of blind faith which causes people to hurt and humiliate other members of the human race, then they haven’t only gone off the deep end, but are on a way to a kind of subservient faith in government which made Nazism possible. Medals were awarded too, to those who committed atrocities at concentration camps.

Some may call me outlandish for making the comparison but the reality is that sentiments like Kristol’s are how nascent feelings of dangerous nationalism or fascism are born.

-Marc-