Education Quote by Edward Kennedy

A line like this is engineered to detonate, not to persuade politely. Kennedy takes a symbol the American public already understood - Saddam’s torture chambers - and flips the ownership label. “Reopened under new management” borrows the language of a storefront grand opening, a grimly banal phrase that turns atrocity into a customer-service metaphor. The rhetorical punch is the juxtaposition: torture isn’t just happening; it’s being franchised. The word “shamefully” signals that the primary target isn’t Saddam or even Iraqi officials but the American self-image. Kennedy is indicting the moral brand of the United States.

The context is the post-9/11 security state and the Iraq War era, when reports of Abu Ghraib and other abuses were collapsing the administration’s claim that U.S. force would bring rule of law and human dignity. Kennedy’s intent is to make any attempt at euphemism impossible. By naming “U.S. management,” he rejects the dodge that abuses were a few “bad apples” or a fog-of-war accident. It implies policy, or at least culpable command negligence: management sets the incentives, tolerates the shortcuts, signs off on the culture.

The subtext is political and strategic as much as ethical. If America becomes the inheritor of Saddam’s methods, then the war’s justification curdles into parody: liberation that reproduces the apparatus of tyranny. The line isn’t asking for incremental reform; it’s trying to force a choice between national security rhetoric and the country’s claimed civilizational identity.