It's Easy To Publish Brave Editorials on a Saturday

Technorati Tags: Douglas Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Iraq, al-Qaeda, Pentagon, Office of Special Plans,

Open the window, and let a cold, vigorous, utterly refreshing wind blow through: They call the wind tristero:

On the day of the week when the fewest people read the Times, the brave, brave editors got around to opining on the unbelievably filthy activities of Douglas Feith:

It took far too long, but a report by the Pentagon inspector general has finally confirmed that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's do-it-yourself intelligence office cooked up a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda to help justify an unjustifiable war...

The inspector general did not recommend criminal charges against Mr. Feith because Mr. Rumsfeld or his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, approved their subordinate’s “inappropriate” operations.

Now let's shake off the lulling effect of their deliberately dispassionate language and think about all this for a few moments. Then it becomes quite clear that given what is actually at issue here, the editors' atrociously mixed metaphor - "cooked up a link" - is an inexcusably cowardly effort to avoid their solemn responsibility to talk truth to power.

Even in the face of an official report from the Pentagon inspector general which all but says so, the New York Times still cannot screw up the courage to state plainly the only possible conclusion: The Bush administration knowingly, criminally lied to the American people in order to start an illegal war and invade a country that, no matter how odious its leader, was no threat to the United States. Nor do the editors have the guts to dispense with cooked links and write clearly about the ghastly consequences: Feith's hands - and those of even higher officials - are dripping red with the blood of over 3100 American soldiers and countless thousands (literally) of innocent Iraqis, victims of the murderous evil of this administration's lies.

This is not the kind of behavior over which to mince words. These are the sorts of actions that treason trials and international war crimes tribunals are for.

There is something terribly corrupt about a country that will permit such unspeakable, murderous acts to remain unpunished. And it is high time the so-called political and cultural leaders of this country said so without equivocation. My God, people, we've had our country's government openly as well as secretly establish concentration camps all over the world; practice torture as an approved government policy; engaged in, and boasted about, international assasinations; destroyed through military action a foreign state merely because it could (and openly plan to do it again in the near future); undermined the integrity of the press by deliberately planting false stories and suborning journalists; been exposed as capable of using every tactic short of physical violence to prevent critics from publishing the truth; ignored the will of the American people, expert opinion, commonsense, and all common decency; advocated ever more bizarre theories of unlimited, unchecked power, and acted as if they were the law of the land ...

We are being ruled by psychopaths and fascists, not link cookers.