Examining torture in the Bush era (McManus / LAT)

[struggle4progress]

To get to the bottom of the Bush administration's torture policies, we must start at the top.
Doyle McManus
April 26, 2009

Dick Cheney is right. President Obama should release any evidence the government has that shows whether torture -- sorry, "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- induced Al Qaeda detainees to give up information that saved American lives ...

Those memos are only a starting point. There's also a secret 2004 report from the CIA's inspector general that described the interrogations in such horrifying terms that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet immediately suspended the program he had created. And there are secret memos from officials in the Defense and State departments questioning whether the abuse of prisoners was producing anything that couldn't have been learned through less ugly methods.

All those documents and more should be declassified and released so that our own government can see more clearly what it has done and learn from its mistakes ...

The central question today isn't whether some CIA contractors overstepped the blurry lines of their rule book, or whether a few pliable lawyers in the Justice Department produced legal opinions to satisfy their bosses. We know they did. Now we need to ask why the government was unable to correct an erroneous course for seven years, except when the Supreme Court forced it to -- and then only minimally. We don't need criminal prosecutions; we need public accountability at the top. Starting, for example, with public testimony from Dick Cheney.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus26-2009apr26,0,7993273.column