A POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY TOBY HARNDEN OF THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
Your words indeed fit the subject.
But I am afraid Tom Tancredo is not a lone mad fool out there, yelling at the thunderclaps in the middle of the night.
There is a significant American audience for this kind of stuff.
You may remember 'the reverend' Franklin Graham, a man with a following of tens of thousands, spluttering about using atomic weapons on America's enemies shortly after 9/11.
I can never forget von Rumsfeld telling the press, during the early days of 'victory' in Afghanistan, that the prisoners they'd taken, thousands of them, should be killed or walled away for ever.
It was the most shocking statement I recall a high American official ever making.
Well, General Dostum, one of America's allies, took him at his word and several thousand prisoners 'disappeared' while American troops stood by and watched and even helped.
According to a Scottish documentary filmmaker, Jamie Doran, the men were driven out into the desert in trucks to be suffocated.
And as I don't doubt you've likely read, the worst pictures from Abu Ghraib have been suppressed.
America's greatest living investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, said the pictures included boys being raped by American guards.
It perhaps should be noted that a well-regarded scientific study a few years back conducted across a number of countries, found America displayed one of the highest rate of mental illness in the world.
Around 26% of Americans were found to be suffering from significant mental illnesses (as defined by the psychiatric book), as compared, for example, to about 8% for Italy.
I've never doubted those results.
