Ghost prisons a blot on America's moral leadership

[dArKeR]

By Isabel Hilton
THE GUARDIAN , London

The delegates gathered in Boston for the Democratic convention are now reported to be overwhelmingly opposed to the war in Iraq. But if their belated opposition is to change the policy of a future Kerry administration, it will require a return to respect for the law.

The delusion that officeholders know better than the law is an occupational hazard of the powerful and one to which those of an imperial cast of mind are especially prone. Checks and balances -- the constitutional underpinning of the democratic idea that no one individual can be trusted with unlimited power -- are there to keep such delusions under control.

The Abu Ghraib photographs awakened many in the US to the abuses that lie beneath the rhetoric of the global war on terror but the institutions responsible have not taken the message on board. On the day the Congressional report into Sept. 11 was published, another document was quietly released -- a military report that exonerated the high command for the Abu Ghraib abuses.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/07/30/2003181030