What kind of people?

What kind of people would do this, would allow this?

Interviews with former intelligence officers and interrogators provided new details and confirmed earlier accounts of inmates being shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial. In addition, some may have been forcibly given enemas as punishment. ...

The information from the various sources frequently matched, providing corroboration of the use of specific procedures, which included prolonged sleep deprivation and shackling prisoners in uncomfortable positions for many hours.

I'll tell you what kind: The kind of of people would blandly lie about it and, when caught red-handed in their lies, continue to tell them with a straight face, continue, as did Lt. Col. Leon H. Sumpter, the spokesman for the military command at Guantánamo, to say that

"All detainees are safeguarded and are assured food, drink, clothing, shelter, health care and basic rights, all in accordance with the Geneva Convention. The U.S. does not permit, tolerate or condone torture by any of its personnel or employees."

The kind of people who would more than allow it, more than lie about it, but would go out of their way to justify it, to argue the law didn't apply, that courts had no jurisdiction, that decent treatment was a "quaint" relic of bygone days, that the president could simply ignore the law. The sort of people who would claim they didn't use torture by the device of defining it so narrowly, as only that which involved "excruciating and agonizing pain" at a level accompanying that of "death or organ failure," that almost nothing would fit the description, only to run like cowards from their own words when they were discovered.

The sort of people who would be

preparing long-range plans for indefinitely imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn over to courts in the United States or other countries....

The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts. ...

As part of a solution, the Defense Department, which holds 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, plans to ask Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence, according to defense officials.

That is, the sort of people who will imprison others for life precisely because they do not have evidence to actually charge them with anything. The sort of people who will seriously propose the

transfer of large numbers of Afghan, Saudi and Yemeni detainees from the military's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center into new U.S.-built prisons in their home countries. The prisons would be operated by those countries, but the State Department, where this idea originated, would ask them to abide by recognized human rights standards and would monitor compliance,

blandly asserting that in the wake of Afghanistan, of Abu Ghraib, of Gitmo, that they can trusted to protect prisoners' rights anywhere, much less in countries such as those.

The same sort of people who while swearing swearing swearing they absolutely abhor torture will engage in "rendering" prisoners to less subtle places like Egypt or Jordan because, in the words of one writer

"[i]n Europe, the custodial interrogations have yielded almost nothing" because they do not use the threat of sending detainees to a country where they are likely to be tortured.

The sort of people who, when courts ruled that prisoners had the right to judicial review, responded by setting up "combatant status review panels, claiming for themselves exactly the power to review cases which the Supreme Court said was not theirs.

The kind of people who will casually brutalize and casually lie to cover up their casual brutality. And all to serve their own ends, their own ideologies, with no sign of conscience.

What should we call them? What sort of people are they? Terrorists? It certainly suits the brutality. Fascists? Always a volatile term, but what else do you call people who maintain that they personally define what the law is and can change that definition as they see fit? Isn't that a basic essence of fascism?

Certainly both names fit, but I say there is a better one, one which I have used before, in fact I've used it since May: sociopaths. People who know the difference between right and wrong but just don't care. That's it. We have a government of sociopaths. And the most dangerous thing about it is that, as events have clearly shown, sociopathology can be contagious.