It's frustrating when major newspapers "legitimize" a story...like the recent New York Times series on the administration's approval and use of torture. That the administration had been torturing, or abetting torture of, those held, or kidnapped by, U.S. forces and agents is old news.
Still, the Times report has some interesting details. It would appear that the famous Gonzalez hospital visit to then Attorney General Ashcroft may have been about getting approval for torture. In any case, then acting Attorney General and Ashcroft drama participant, James Comey, objected strenuously to the policy and left the agency saying they would all be "'ashamed' when the world eventually learned of it."
...I am increasingly confident that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation's recent history -- not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals -- lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers -- without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained.
There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death....
We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?
Righties are predictably nonplussed. Michael Goldfarb, for example, claims that the Times and Sullivan are "trivializing torture." It's not like the U.S. is using medieval techniques of torture, after all, just Gestapo and KGB tactics.
Sort of ironic, if you consider the recent rightie outcry about an ad. In a newspaper.
