Bybee's a Moron Mormon? -- The Chile Connection

Okay, it might seem like I'm blowing a one-note trumpet here, but as you all know, I've been thinking some about the Church of the Latter Day H8te lately.

So, given all that I know about the One True Church, it doesn't surprise me that one of the chief architects of the BFEE Jack-Bauer-Is-God torture doctrine -- better known by its official milktoasty namby-pamby inoffensive bureaucratic name of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" -- was one Jay Bybee, a proud graduate of Bring'em Young University and who, coincidentally (or not), was on a Mormon mission in, of all places, Chile during the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the installation of the murderous Augusto Pinochet regime.

And the chief hallmark of the Pinochet regime, for those who have been living under a rock since 1973, was ... torture!

I'm just saying.

But think about it: He was young, he was impressionable (to say the least) and he was a whole-hearted adherent to that rigid authoritarianism that is the hallmark of the patriarchal One True Church. And the US government, as well as all of its lockstep goose-stepping propaganda arms (which even back then included the Moron Mormon Church), was on record both overtly and covertly as opposing the "Marxist" regime of Allende, and supporting the repressive dictatorship of Pinochet.

So there was poor Jay Bybee, in the middle of it all. No wonder that he grew up to think that torture was kindness, that down was up, that left was right, and that, in the words engraved on every Wehrmacht belt buckle from the start of the German Empire through World War II, "Gott mit uns"...