[Peace-discuss] Torture memo

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The torture memo leaked to Monday's WSJ and NYT (one of several,
apparently) turns out to have been drafted by a creature of
Reagan/Meese/Watt provenance (like so much of the Bush administration).  
Our friend Jeff St. Clair of <counterpunch.org> has a good piece there
today on that group, remembering his late friend (and Reagan contemporary)
the environmentalist David Brower. Three selections follow. --CGE]

Unlike many liberals, Brower never wrote off Reagan as an incompetent and
incoherent stooge. He knew better. Brower, the archdruid, and Reagan, the
union-busting snitch, had sparred with each other across the decades --
first in California over parks and wild rivers, pesticide spraying,
nuclear power and the governor's brutal attacks on the peaceable citizens
of Brower's hometown of Berkeley; and later around the globe over
wilderness, endangered species, the illegal war on Nicaragua and the
proliferation of nuclear weapons...

Brower viewed Reagan as a mean-spirited and calculating politician,
entirely cognizant of and culpable for his crimes. He refused to allow the
old man access to the twin escape hatches of plausible deniablity and
senile dementia...

Soon, Watt's divinely-inspired vigilantism against nature would be
replaced by a more calculating approach, a kinder and gentler path to
exploitation, that reached a terrible crescendo under Clinton and Gore, a
team which, according to Brower's expert calculation, did more damage to
the American environment in their first four years in office than Reagan
and Bush I accomplished in 12 years...

	***