Bush’s Last Push for Torture

[Joanne98]

In its lame-duck year, the administration has been conducting a PR campaign for waterboarding.

by Rosa Brooks


Bush’s Last Push for Torture
In its lame-duck year, the administration has been conducting a PR campaign for waterboarding.

by Rosa Brooks
They’re baack!

The Bushies, that is. I was so preoccupied with the presidential primaries that I almost forgot about that guy who keeps hanging around in the White House, despite the nation’s fervent desire that he disappear. And I’m sure I wasn’t alone in my memory lapse. With the news so full of Obama, Clinton, McCain and Huckabee, Bush and Cheney had started to seem like dead men walking.

But I was making the classic horror movie mistake. You know … you let down your guard for an instant, and that’s when you realize that the dead men walking are actually vampires — and they’re stalking you.

That’s what happened this week. While we were all fixated on who will be the next president, loyalists to the outgoing president took advantage of our collective distraction to try to leave a last gruesome legacy for the American people: torture.

Remember waterboarding? In most versions of waterboarding, detainees are blindfolded and then strapped to a board. After that, they have water poured into their mouth and nose, sometimes through a cloth or cellophane (to enhance the sensation of simultaneous smothering and drowning). It was a favorite interrogation method of the Spanish Inquisition. U.S. courts have recognized it as torture, and in past wars, the U.S. government prosecuted it as a war crime.

Not anymore! While the rest of us were obsessing over the 600 possible methods of counting delegates, the Bush administration was busily conducting a PR campaign on behalf of waterboarding.

It began last week. First, Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey told Congress that no one could be investigated or prosecuted for “whatever was done” as part of a covert CIA interrogation program because the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had given its blessing to a bunch of secret “whatevers.” Then CIA Director Michael V. Hayden openly acknowledged, for the first time, that “whatever” had, in fact, included waterboarding, which was used on at least three Al Qaeda suspects.

Did Hayden blush to confess that U.S. intelligence agencies were incapable of getting critical intelligence through means other than torture? Nope. Along with National Intelligence Director J. Michael McConnell, Hayden suggested that waterboarding might well be handy again in the future.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/14/7052/

[Demeter]

1. Hell, I Am All For Waterboarding BushCo Bushbots!

Especially the Big Dick himself and the psycho who would be dictator.