There is much to despise in the administration of George W. Bush. Its secret program for inflicting torture certainly leads the counts of the anti-democratic indictment of this reprehensible regime.
Scott Horton, a human rights attorney, writing at Harper's has written among the most incisive commentary on Bush's human rights violations, and has broken much ground uncovering the administration's corruption of the Department of Justice that has often functioned as a political machine using the power of the prosecutor on Republicans' political enemies.
Many agencies of government of been similarly corrupted and used for purposes that can only be labeled as indecent.
For those Americans, and there are tens of millions of them, for whom human rights, liberty and clean and open government remain the foundations of a decent society, acting against this administration is a moral imperative.
What the historian Norman Cohn called the "mood of passive compliance" that enabled the Holocaust and the rise of the NAZIs ought not allow continuation of Bush's atrocities that (though not comparable to the Holocaust) have claimed millions of victims, corrupted the foundations of a society, and functioned with the same levers of citizen disengagement.
Horton latest column can be read at We Do Not Torture.
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