Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Torture?

We don't do torture.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

We just call it by a different name and that gives the Bush administration deniability. Via Digby at Hullabaloo, the New York Times:
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.
Why on earth did they want to use torture in the first place? Besides getting off on it, I mean. It doesn't work, it is the coward's way to a solution, and it loses us the moral high ground. Why did they do it?

2 comments:

Steve Bates said...

Why did they do it?

Because they're thugs. Brutal, mindless, amoral thugs. Law-defying, anticonstitutional, un-American thugs. There is no way they can overcome their own base nature. And neither can we... overcome their base nature... at least for now.

I've just finished reading Joe Conason's It Can Happen Here, and the only thing I quibble with is his title: it has happened here. And I'm increasingly convinced it will end badly: there is no good outcome from this point.

Like most UUs, I explicitly disbelieve in the existence of a biblical Hell. But sometimes, as I look at the Bushist administration, I regret that belief.

ellroon said...

I think hell can be our experience on earth when we do allow our basest nature to rule us.

And yes, it HAS happened here, to the Native Americans, the Chinese, the Irish, the Japanese, the Mexican... As I've said before, I just assumed that those were in the past and that we now knew better.

Who knew we'd hit bottom so fast in just seven years?