The BG's Derrick Z. Jackson: Bush and Psalm 115

the op-ed piece is entitled, "invisible integrity..." it's not a pleasant read...

What America did not know at the time or chose not to believe was which part of the Bible Bush would emphasize. It must have been Psalm 115. That passage says, ''They have mouths, but they cannot speak; eyes have they, but they cannot see. They have ears, but they cannot hear; noses, but they cannot smell. They have hands, but they cannot feel; feet but they cannot walk; They make no sound with their throat."

That would certainly explain prisoners held without charge for years, ghost detainees, CIA secret prisons, the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, and beatings and dog attacks in immigration detention centers on our soil. This week, National Public Radio broadcast a gut-wrenching feature on Richard Rust, an immigrant detainee who died last year at the federal prison in Oakdale, La. According to witnesses, Rust collapsed but did not receive medical attention for 20 minutes. The ambulance did not arrive for another 20 minutes.

Besides the death, which prisoner rights advocates say could constitute ''deliberate indifference" and thus cruel and unusual punishment, current and former detainees talked about daily dehumanization such as being called boy and being told to go back where they came from. They said that the day after Rust's death, guards swept up friends of Rust and put them in windowless punishment cells for up to three months. They said they were intimidated by staff not to talk about Rust.

It all adds up to why the members of the 9/11 Commission this week gave the Bush administration an F for coalition detention standards, saying, ''The US has not engaged in a common coalition approach to developing standards for detention and prosecution of captured terrorists. Indeed, US treatment of detainees has elicited broad criticism and makes it harder to build the necessary alliances to cooperate effectively with partners in a global war on terror." It was one of 17 F's or D's the bipartisan commissioners gave the administration for its responses to 9/11. It awarded no A's and just one A-minus -- for shutting down funding of terrorist networks.

when are we going to be rid of this administration...? 2008 is entirely too far away...

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