I can't read this memo...it's torture!
From the Washington Post today:We learned four years ago that a confession extracted under torture by Egyptian authorities from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a captured terror suspect who had been rendered to Egypt by the CIA, was the sole source for arguments Bush made in a key pre-Iraq war speech in October 2002. "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," Bush said, uttering torture-inspired fiction. The same statements also provided a critical part of then-secretary of state Colin Powell's famous presentation to the United Nations, a month before the invasion.
The [Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody] report also makes it clear that the decision to adopt techniques nearly universally acknowledged to be torture was made much earlier -- and in a much more calculated manner -- than the Bush administration led the public to believe.
The Armed Services Committee actually released the executive summary of this report last December. It concluded that the Bush administration's consistent blaming of the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere on "a few bad apples" was in fact a pack of lies. (See my December 12 column, Pack of Liars.) Instead, the committee found: "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."
That was our governement, people. That's the Pro-Life Bush Administration at work. That's Compassionate Conservatism in practice. It sickens me to think about it.
But we should think about it. We should talk about it more. And the people who made these decisions should be punished. It isn't smart to pick a scab unless there's an infection underneath it. Sometimes you have to open it up and air it out before it can get better. Would we even be in Iraq if they hadn't used torture to extract a "confession" about the linkage between Iraq and The Base? How many lives have been lost, disrupted, ruined because of this ongoing foray?
The [Inquiry Into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody] report also makes it clear that the decision to adopt techniques nearly universally acknowledged to be torture was made much earlier -- and in a much more calculated manner -- than the Bush administration led the public to believe.
The Armed Services Committee actually released the executive summary of this report last December. It concluded that the Bush administration's consistent blaming of the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere on "a few bad apples" was in fact a pack of lies. (See my December 12 column, Pack of Liars.) Instead, the committee found: "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."
That was our governement, people. That's the Pro-Life Bush Administration at work. That's Compassionate Conservatism in practice. It sickens me to think about it.
But we should think about it. We should talk about it more. And the people who made these decisions should be punished. It isn't smart to pick a scab unless there's an infection underneath it. Sometimes you have to open it up and air it out before it can get better. Would we even be in Iraq if they hadn't used torture to extract a "confession" about the linkage between Iraq and The Base? How many lives have been lost, disrupted, ruined because of this ongoing foray?