Bush & Torture

That the Bush regime ordered and practiced widespread torture as a matter of administrative policy complete with odious lawyerly justifications, is such a commonplace it is hardly remarked upon.

Here, however, are a couple highlights in recent commentary.

William Pfaff:

Yet there is a limit. The latest case of the human moral vacuum created and encouraged during the Bush years is so outrageous, perverse, sadistic and nihilistic that it demands attention, for all that it tells us about the rest that has happened. I speak of the ordered, authorized, and conscientiously supervised water-boarding of two prisoners 266 times.

The men who authorized, ordered, and performed such acts should be hanged. It is as simple as that.

Now as we dont believe in the death penalty, this option is not available to us, but arrested, prosecuted, convicted and jailed: yes.

Marjorie Cohn highlights one of the more freakish or ironic elements, Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11:

Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003. That link was never established.

Now there was no link between Saddam and 9/11, nor any weapons of mass destruction, it was all a knowing lie. So what are we to make of this? Incompetence? They savagely tortured these people and couldnt get them to admit that Saddam was in on the plot?

That the Bush regime ordered and practiced widespread torture as a matter of administrative policy complete with odious lawyerly justifications, is such a commonplace it is hardly remarked upon.

Here, however, are a couple highlights in recent commentary.

William Pfaff:

Yet there is a limit. The latest case of the human moral vacuum created and encouraged during the Bush years is so outrageous, perverse, sadistic and nihilistic that it demands attention, for all that it tells us about the rest that has happened. I speak of the ordered, authorized, and conscientiously supervised water-boarding of two prisoners 266 times.

The men who authorized, ordered, and performed such acts should be hanged. It is as simple as that.

Now as we dont believe in the death penalty, this option is not available to us, but arrested, prosecuted, convicted and jailed: yes.

Marjorie Cohn highlights one of the more freakish or ironic elements, Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11:

Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003. That link was never established.

Now there was no link between Saddam and 9/11, nor any weapons of mass destruction, it was all a knowing lie. So what are we to make of this? Incompetence? They savagely tortured these people and couldnt get them to admit that Saddam was in on the plot?

Bush & Torture