War on Terra is Phony

Scott Horton of Harper's Magazine has a pretty active blog called No Comment: several quality posts a day usually. I've been meaning to link to No Comment before, but yesterday's post re: Newt Gingrich admitting the War on Terra is a hoax practically begs to receive a wider audience.

As the cliché goes: The War on on a Noun would be funny, if it wasn't so tragic.

“Gingrich: War on Terror is Phony” by Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine):It’s reassuring, isn’t it, to learn that at an insiders’ conference of young conservative activists, former House Speaker and G.O.P. presidential wannabe Newt Gingrich is spreading the word that the Bush Administration’s war on terror is a sham, and that the current struggle is all really just about oil
... Reading these remarks brought two scenes into my mind. The first was from a recent conference I attended in Italy with a group of European and American counterterrorism experts. A large team of U.S. Department of Justice officials, drawn from its uppermost echelons, was there, including three of the principal architects of the legal policies for the war on terror. In not-for-attribution comments, one openly acknowledged that the war on terror was cast in the first instance as a political ploy and that it was a conceptual failure. It was now essential for the Americans to move on to something else, he argued. None of the others challenged that view; indeed, two of them said that they agreed with it. So even inside of the Bush Administration, the war on terror has been written off as a scam that served its limited political purpose and is finished. However, this intellectual refuse continues to be the policy of the U.S. government: people suffer in prison and are tortured and abused because of it. That’s intellectual bankruptcy.

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This page contains a single entry by Seth A. published on August 8, 2007 12:02 PM.

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