Letters to the Editor

Obama's allegedly "new" centrism and his ABC interview today How have people become convinced that the decades-old Beltway platitudes of "centrism," post-partisanship and non-ideological "competence" are now new and transformative? Glenn Greenwald [2009-01-11]

• How Ironic

  that the nation's first African-American President may, if Glenn's assessment proves true, be announcing that the Constitutional principle laid out in Brown v. Mississippi has become, like the Geneva Conventions, "pre-9/11 thinking." That case involved black prisoners being whipped and then further tortured until they "confessed," later to be convicted on this evidence alone. The opinion of a unanimous Supreme Court overturning the convictions stated:

  "Coercing the supposed state's criminals into confessions and using such confessions so coerced from them against them in trials has been the curse of all countries. It was the chief iniquity, the crowning infamy of the Star Chamber, and the Inquisition, and other similar institutions. The Constitution recognized the evils that lay behind these practices and prohibited them in this country."

  -- lennonist
  [Read lennonist's other letters]
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