November 14, 2005. That’s the date of my first post addressing the use of torture by the Bush administration. (Run a Pied Type search on “torture” to see the rest.) My mind was made up long before the current, increasingly heated discussion began. Suffice it to say that while the media, the pundits, and the politicians from both parties are playing gotcha with all this, I’m sitting here impatiently waiting for the unavoidable, inescapable conclusion that torture did take place; that the orders to employ it, hide it, and lie about it originated in the Bush White House; and that heads at the highest level should roll for this systematic, intentional violation of the laws of humanity and of international law as stated in the Geneva Conventions.
Methinks they doth protest too much … Cheney, Rove and their ilk. The more this heats up and the longer it goes on, the louder they howl that it was not torture — and even if it was, it was justified. Cheney (why isn’t he gone, anyway?) and the GOP have back-pedaled and back-pedaled until their defense has become not so much a defense but a protest that all the information hasn’t been released yet, that we haven’t heard yet what information was obtained by the “not-torture.” Sooo, once we see that information, the torture somehow, magically, won’t be torture anymore? ’Scuse me? How does that work?
I hope Eric Holder is busy sharpening his figurative pens and drafting those subpoenas and other legal documents. Because, god forbid, if we don’t police ourselves and hold ourselves accountable for what happened, I see absolutely no reason why the rest of the world shouldn’t step in and do it. The United States is no more above international law than our president is above US law.
Of interest: Executive Summary, Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody
I don’t see what the problem is. Let the military take care of this type of thing and keep pelosi and obama and the rest of the left wing sissies out of it. I say they weren’t tortured enough.
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It should have been a military matter, but it wasn’t. Civilians in the Bush administration, apparently including Cheney, Rice, Rove, and Bush himself, rejected military advice on all kinds of things and substituted their own judgment, issuing orders to both the military and the CIA about how the prisoners should be handled. And the prisoners themselves weren’t considered military; they were designated “enemy combatants.”
I don’t believe anything that will be done about this. The top Democrats in Congress knew about the torture but stayed silent. I honestly don’t believe Reed and Pelosi will allow any investigation. Again politics will stand in the way of justice.
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I’d like to see this pursued until the responsible parties, whoever they might be, are publicly identified and appropriately punished. I still think if that doesn’t happen, it will be because Obama insists on “moving forward,” not “looking back” (although at the moment the whole thing seems to be getting away from him …).