Informant38

war for national security

A legal motion filed in federal court in November 2004 and declassified on 5 January 2005, renews concern on the case of Australian detainee Mamdouh Habib. The motion begins:
"In October, 2001, the Unites States military - in cooperation with the Pakistani and Egyptian Governments - rendered Mamdouh Habib to Egypt, knowing and intending he would be tortured Mr. Habib spent six months in Egyptian custody, where he was subjected to unspeakable brutality. Afterwards, Mr. Habib was returned to United States custody, travelling first to Bagram Air Force Base, then to the U.S. military facility at Kandahar, then to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he has been held since May, 2002."
[...]
The motion seeks a restraining order to prevent the feared transfer of Mamdouh Habib to Egypt or the Egyptian authorities . The document details the alleged torture to which Mamdouh Habib was previously subjected in Egypt, including electric shocks, water torture, physical assaults, suspension from hooks, and threats with dogs. It gives details about how US agents were present at his interrogations in Pakistan after his arrest, and during his secret transfer to Egypt. The details echo those given by others who claim to have been subjected to such "rendition". For example, Amnesty International is still awaiting a reply to a letter it sent to the US authorities in August 2004 on the case of Khalid El Masri, a German national of Lebanese origin who alleges that he was secretly flown to incommunicado detention in Afghanistan from Macedonia in early 2004, and that US agents were present during interrogations in secret detention in Kabul

Amnesty International Canada 06.Jan.05
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The overall idea is it's not a sin if you get someone else to do it for you. Not crime, sin. This is not politics, it's religion.
And this article is directly related, in a tangential way:

"So once you begin to dabble with the idea that you want to bully people, that you want to order them around, that you want them to do what you say, you very frequently start to drift into anti-Semitism," he said. "I think that is what is happening in some of the cultural elites in Europe."
He said Jews have always promoted the primacy of the law over the leader, as evidenced by their dietary restrictions and dress.
"People hate Jews to very much the degree that they have come to realize that this notion of the rule of law is something that came to the world something between three and four millennia ago in the Sinai desert. The idea that the government is above the ruler, and that rulers, whether it's King David or anyone else, are to be held to account by the people, by great prophets, by whomever - that notion essentially came out of the Sinai desert," Woolsey said.

Woolsey neglects to mention God in his list of those to whom rulers are to be held accountable, which seems odd considering what he's talking about.
It's bizarre to think anyone could imagine there were no laws, in the sense of codified rules of behavior, before Moses. It's extremeley bizarre that a former head of the CIA talks like this in public. And it's frighteningly bizarre that he could suggest, and be quoted internationally suggesting, that anti-Semitism is parallel with a hatred of law.
But it fits together, you just have to turn the pieces upside-down.
We have laws against torture in the US, and we are great respecters of law here and we are not at all anti-Semitic - so we don't torture prisoners, not officially anyway. In the US. Because of the laws against that. So we farm them out to places that don't have those laws. Like Egypt, where they officially torture prisoners. Or surrealest of all localities, Guantanamo Bay, real estate on the south-western tip of Cuba, sworn enemy of the US. We have a naval base on their island. We torture people there. Because we respect the law. The law doesn't say we can't, so we can. This is how it works.
In the same article, sourced to the National Post, quoting Woolsey in a speech he gave at York University in Toronto in November 2003, there's this gleaming, gemlike paragraph:

Meanwhile, Arab countries have succeeded in neutralizing Israel's bid to have the United Nations show as much concern for Israeli children killed in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict as it has done for Palestinian youth.

Children...youth. Israeli children killed...Palestinian youth.
Youth what? Just...youth.
The actual statistics are less vague:

Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces 643

Israeli minors killed by Palestinians 113

There are approximately 1.1 million Palestinians in Israel and the OT.
22% of the population. Though reducing the death toll to numbers is dry and too much like some kind of grotesque sports contest, it's the only way to counter the emotional dishonesty of equivalence.

And the houses. The houses destroyed are something like 4,000 to none.

So it's alright to lie, it's alright to torture, it's alright to kill.
Or it isn't.
And above the law there is something much greater than the law.
Or there isn't.