Sonderkommandos

Ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson:

Let’s hear it for Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer, 21st century sonderkommandos, because they are helping install an Attorney General who parses words and facts while refusing to delcare that water boarding is torture. For the poorly educated, sonderkommandos were Jewish prisoners in the Nazi death camps who helped entice unsuspecting Jewish men, women, and children into the gas chambers and helped dispose of the bodies. And yes, I mean the comparison.

I am sure my characterization of Feinstein and Schumer in this regard will be condemned but so be it. It is what it is. As a teenager reading William Shrier’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I was fascinated and horrified to learn that some Jewish prisoners willingly took part in helping the Nazis exterminate other Jews. I grant you, Feinstein and Schumer are not executing anyone, but they are putting their blessing on a man so clueless that he does not know that a practice that mimics drowning is torture.

I had always assumed that Jews who survived the Holocaust or the relatives of those who were murdered under the Nazi plan would understand the importance of standing against tyrants and torturers. And for the most part that has been true. But now we are confronted with the spectacle of two prominent Jewish American legislators who are enabling a President who has authorized torture. They have no shame...

Well, nobody is being executed, at least not yet. But by signing off on a potential Attorney General who is unwilling to condemn without reservation a practice that is inhuman and illegal, we can begin to understand how seemingly decent people will let themselves participate, whether by omission or commission, in facilitating the violation of international conventions. The road to gas chambers starts when good people find excuses to justify torture and murder. Feinstein and Schumer are enablers.

Let's just hope the good voices get a hearing before it's too late.