The Vulgarity of the Neocons

TBogg lays into the vile Michael Gerson, who finds Al Franken, and not the handiwork he helped to create in Mesopotamia "vulgar". It may be heavy handed to lay the responsibility for the needless death and dismemberment of thousands of young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis at the door of a small group of people who ginned up this ridiculous war, but as McClatchy points out today, the decision to abrogate our nations laws and ignore two hundred years of precedent with regard to the treatment of detainees was essentially hatched and executed by five lawyers:

The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.

And so it went with the run up to Iraq. PNAC was a small group, made up of a handful of neocons like Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Michael Gerson and William Kristol, a group convinced of their rightness who refuse to this day to admit that the decision to launch this disastrous war was anything but correct. Their astounding arrogance and hubris knows absolutely no bounds, and their academic enablers, the Kagan family, continue to defend them and their work in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Like the five lawyers who squandered our good name and forever sullied the principles upon which our international reputation was built, these men should be considered War Criminals. They should be shunned by men of good will, left alone to be tortured by the screams of the Iraqi children who they are directly responsible for butchering. Instead, they sit comfortably in leather chairs on Fox News, smugly asserting their omniscience. Until we decide that they should be shunned and ignored, they will remain supremely confident in their rightness, and urge us on to greater folly in Iran.

To assume that these ghouls would have the conscience to admit their own errors is the highest folly indeed.