It’s nice to be reminded that we do things differently now:
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Senate Intelligence Committee voted Thursday to release parts of a hotly contested, secret report that harshly criticizes CIA terror interrogations after 9/11, and the White House said it would instruct intelligence officials to cooperate fully.
The result sets the stage for what could be the fullest public accounting of the Bush administration’s record when it comes to waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The panel voted 11-3 to order the declassification of almost 500 pages of the 6,300-page review, which concludes the harsh methods employed at CIA-run prisons overseas were excessively cruel and ineffective in producing valuable intelligence.
Now, a lot of “people” in the know might not want to name names directly responsible, opting instead to attempt to put this squarely on the shoulders of President Obama and maybe Jan in accounting working at the Brainerd, Minnesota branch of the CIA. But torture, or, “enhanced interrogation,” was a policy result that came directly from the top.
It seems like just the other day, former Vice President Dick Cheney was going on and on about the virtues of America being a torturer. Telling the crowd at The Kennedy Political Union, Cheney insisted, “Some people called it torture. It wasn’t torture,” but also added, “If I would have to do it all over again, I would.” Cheney said, “The results speak for themselves.”
Sure they do! Which is what the lawyers for the torture-orderers-at-large(Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, etc.)argued as far back as 2002.
Soon after, Secretary Of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was coming up with all new and improved depraved methods of torturing captive human beings, writing in a famous memo about stress positions, Rumsfeld complained about the beneficial torture treatment that our captured enemy combatants were being subjected to was outdated, writing, ”I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours? D.R.”
And, just today, in an interview on Fox News Sunday, Former NSA and CIA Director and current torture-apologist Michael Hayden told Chris Wallace that all this limp-dick talk of torture being a bad thing only serves to make the case that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Diane Feinstein(D-CA) is just acting on “emotion,” rather than an objective review of the torture facts.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush has certainly had more than enough time to find a prison-friendly hobby.
So, just to be clear, when we’re talking about torture, we’re talking about the Republican party’s foreign policy manifesto.
Scoring the “Both-sides” meme at home:
Bush-era: Pro-torture, *illegal* warrantless wiretapping, WMDs, stolen treasury, crashed economy and hundreds of thousands dead.
Obama-era: The opposite of that.
(ht Tony Munter)