Your guilt, my guilt

Crooked Timber � � Torture and culpability

Well, maybe if you really, really worked for Kerry then you could let yourself off the hook a bit. If you didn't, however, you're guilty too.

There seems to be some discomfort among a couple of commenters (and perhaps in the blogosphere more generally) with the argument that the US is itself culpable for torture when it hands prisoners over to a regime that the US State Department and the UN describe as a “systematic” torturer. A historic analogy might help clarify matters. On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were arrested by the police in Nashoba County, Mississippi. They were then released by the police at night, on the side of a rural road, where they were picked up by the Ku Klux Klan and then murdered...

It's a good and obvious analogy. America, we are guilty. And yes, we hard fought Kerry supporters are less guilty than those who voted for George.