The Big Lie About Torture

US soliders using "water torture" (now called waterboarding) on Phillipino prisoners after the USA invaded that country.

http://obamboozled.blogspot.com/2009/05/big-lie-about-torture.html

The story goes like this: The US didn't torture until the Bush gang came to power. Some say we're a nation of laws and criminal investigations are the only way to return to our virginal past; others share the same objective but reject prosecutions as needlessly divisive; a third group advocates torture as the new post 9/11 norm. A running theme in the liberal commentariat is that things have gotten much worse. But have they? Glenn Greenwald reminds us that even Reagan opposed torture, so see how low we've fallen.

It's certainly true that Reagan, like most leaders, regularly violated the principles he espoused [eg, opposition to torture] and sought to impose on others, but still, there is an important difference between (a) affirming core principles of the civilized world but then violating them and (b) explicitly rejecting those principles. Doing (a) makes you a hypocrite; doing (b) makes you a morally depraved barbarian.

Ronald Reagan: B Film Actor, Ladies’ Man and FBI Snitch

Portland IndyMedia

If you are a Hollywood film buff and a political junkie, too, as I am, you will just love Marc Eliot's latest book, "Reagan: The Hollywood Years." The author touches on Ronald Reagan's early days in Dixon, Illinois, but mainly focuses on his film career in which he was cast in one bad B movie after another. The main expose in this absorbing tome is that during the days of the "Red Scare," late 40s through the 50s, Reagan was a snitch for the FBI! The author writes that Reagan became a "secret informant, code name 'T-10,' for J. Edgar Hoover's red-baiting FBI." He regularly met with them in LaLaLand and "handed over names of Screen Actor Guild (SAG) members who 'might' be Communist sympathizers." Reagan would also contact his brother, Neil, "from a pay phone on Sunset Boulevard to pass along information" to the FBI. (2)

What brought Reagan, who served as President of SAG, (1947-52), and again in 1959, to do such a terrible thing? I think he was mostly a hollow type of man, vain, insecure and highly self- righteous. The record shows that to protect his rear end, he had become "a commie hunter;" he also carried a gun. The exact number of colleagues on whom Reagan ratted, will probably never be known. Once tagged as a Red "sympathizer," no matter how scanty the evidence, an individual was subjected to being "blacklisted" and barred from working in the Hollywood Industry. The fact that one's political beliefs were protected by the First Amendment didn't stop the witch hunts. Some victims of the blacklisting process were so scarred, that they committed suicide. Mr. Eliot mentions two: Philip Loeb and Barry Crum. (3)