Bush’s torturers follow where the Nazis led (Sullivan: Sunday Times)

[struggle4progress]

From The Sunday Times
October 7, 2007
Andrew Sullivan

I remember that my first response to the reports of abuse and torture at Guantanamo Bay was to accuse the accusers of exaggeration or deliberate deception. I didn’t believe America would ever do those things. I’d also supported George W Bush in 2000, believed it necessary to give the president the benefit of the doubt in wartime, and knew Donald Rumsfeld as a friend ...

From almost the beginning of the war, it is now indisputable, the Bush administration made a strong and formative decision: in the absence of good intelligence on the Islamist terror threat after 9/11, it would do what no American administration had done before. It would torture detainees to get information ...

So is “enhanced interrogation” torture? One way to answer this question is to examine history. The phrase has a lineage. Verschärfte Verneh-mung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the “third degree”. It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.

The United States prosecuted it as a war crime in Norway in 1948. The victims were not in uniform – they were part of the Norwegian insurgency against the German occupation – and the Nazis argued, just as Cheney has done, that this put them outside base-line protections (subsequently formalised by the Geneva conventions) ...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/andrew_sullivan/article2602564.ece

[Mojorabbit]

1. Someone is saying it finally

But why in the British papers and not here.

[Trajan]

3. Sullivan is an american conservative columnist ....

And NOT a Bush lover .....

[Gregorian]

2. They need to stand trial. A real trial. International trial.

Thank you for this great article. I was actually thinking just this today. Riding my bike along a trail, and thinking that we were no better than Nazis.

This cannot stand unpunished. It's far to serious a crime.

It does give me hope, reading this article, knowing that there are many people just like us watching and waiting, and working toward rescuing the victims of this administration.

[silverojo]

4. Angrily K&R n/t

[Senator]

5. Impeachment For Torture Can End The War

We already "have the votes."

--

[ixion]

6. kicked and recommended

finally this notion works its way into mainstream thought. BushCo has been using the Nazi playbook from the get-go. It's about time people start calling a duck a duck.

[dickbearton]

7. Exactly, K&R.

[constitution_matters]

8. Is it torture? Another way to answer...

One way to answer this question is to examine history....

Another way is to ask: if one of our military were captured, would we tolerate that same treatment being done to him/her? Would we call waterboarding, sleep deprivation, binding, starvation, or ceaseless mental duress torture if the detainee wore an American uniform?

[provis99]

9. You lost me on the third sentence, Sullivan

He says he felt it necessary to support a wartime President. In 2000. Uh, Sullivan, 9/11 happened in 2001. Your little freudian slip says you supported Bush before there was any war or terrorist attack. The rest of the article, read in this context, thus leads like an elaborate way for you to suddenly disavow yourself of a President who is now unpopular.

Dope.