"The Government It Deserves"

Just when you think things cannot get much worse.

Yesterday Americans woke up to this excellent piece of investigative reporting by the New York Times: CIA Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations.  The tapes purportedly showed American interrogators engaged in the waterboarding of two detainees - a practice which is illegal under the Geneva Conventions and international law. Apparently the White House was aware of the existence of these tapes, although President Bush has "no recollection" of their existence?  Who ordered their destruction?  Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly discusses the content of the destroyed videos:

So here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical "confessions" under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and law enforcement personnel.

This comes at the end of a week where Americans learned:

1. President Bush has been speaking publicly about "World War III" and a "Nuclear Holocaust" instigated by Iran after he had been informed by his own intelligence agencies that Iran had in fact shut down the nuclear weapons program back in 2003. In other words, he was trying to lie the nation into another war based on a non-existent threat, just as he had (successfully) in 2002-2003. 
2. The American government wants to hold detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp indefinitely outside of all known laws.  We now know that many of these "terrorists" were in fact sold for bounty to the US military in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the "evidence" against them is at best circumstantial.  One detainee, having waited fruitlessly in Guantanamo for six years without any charges filed against him, slit his throat with his own finger nail.

Earlier this week I happened to be rereading the the leaflets of the White Rose group and a couple of sentences from the First Leaflet jumped out at me.  The words are attributed to Hans Scholl (pictured above):

"Nichts ist eines Kulturvolkes unwürdiger, als sich ohne Widerstand von einer verantwortungslosen und dunklen Trieben ergebenen Herrscherclique «regieren» zu lassen....Vergeßt nicht, daß ein jedes Volk diejenige Regierung verdient, die es erträgt!"

(Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct...Do not forget that every people deserves the government it is willing to endure!)

Why did these words resonate so powerfully with me?  You can read all of the Leaflets of the White Rose in both German and English here.