Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the horrors of the Stalinist gulag, is now attempting to tackle one of the most sensitive topics of his writing career - the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet purges.
I said once before, and I still believe this, that the primary purpose of state-sponsored torture, extraordinary renditions, et cetera is to send a message to one's political enemies. Specifically, one's domestic enemies (although if foreigners want to walk away with the impression that they could be next, so much the better). Several historians have observed that the original purpose of the concentration camps constructed by Germany's third Reich had nothing whatsoever to do with ethnic cleansing. When they were first constructed, they housed political prisoners... and overt domestic resistance to the rising National Socialist German Worker's Party fell drastically away as news and rumours of these new camps began to spread. I wrote a rant about this once.
It's no accident that we get the news that we do, and if it appears that Cheney et al. are thumbing their noses at the US Constitution and us as well, it's because they are.
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