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April 23, 2009
The Senate Armed Services Committee has just released an exhaustive review of torture under the Bush administration that challenges the notion that the administration only chose torture as a last resort.
The Bush White House began planning for torture in December 2001, set up a program to develop the interrogation techniques by the next month, and the military and the CIA began training interrogators in coercive practices in early 2002. They then redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.
Martin Rowson
The consensus political elite view in Washington's Beltway culture is that the elites should be exempted from all consequences when they break the law. There must be no investigations or prosecutions for CIA officials who tortured detainees and the Bush officials who designed the torture policies. even though this violates international law and US treaty obligations (both the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture.
Karl Rove Is upset about recent revelations about Bush administration torture policies. He says that the Obama administration's recent disclosures about torture are:
very dangerous. What they've essentially said is if we have policy disagreements with our predecessors.... [W]e're going to turn ourselves into the moral equivalent of a Latin American country run by colonels in mirrored sunglasses and what we're gonna do is prosecute systematically the previous administration, or threaten prosecutions against the previous administration, based on policy differences. Is that what we've come to in this country?"
For the Republican right represented by Rove, the way for the US to avoid becoming a banana republic is to have a President who ignores the rule of law.
There was firm opposition within the Obama administration to the release of interrogation details in four "top secret" memos in which Bush administration lawyers sanctioned harsh tactics. The memo's were released. The Cheney claim that torture works--ie., a regime of torture staved off terror attacks and saved lives is the current primary line of defence of the torture regime of the Bush administration. Cheney has become the chief defender of the Bush regime.
Paul Krugman says in The New York Times that:
It’s hard, then, not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn’t, now declare that we should forget the whole era — for the sake of the country, of course.Sorry, but what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions — not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws.
These are the people who have been relentless in their efforts to block President Obama’s attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change.
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The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use torture on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime.
Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence was ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.
That didn't stop Bush + Co from invading Iraq.