Dave LIndorff: Bush: Torturing the Truth

[babylonsister]

Bush: Torturing the Truth
Submitted by dlindorff on Fri, 2007-10-05 16:22. Impeachment

by Dave LIndorff

President Bush says America “doesn’t torture people.”
He has said this before. The last time it was when Congress had been confronted with the atrocities at the US military-run Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, and was passing legislation that would outlaw torture.

That was when we learned for the first time about the president’s unique and un-Constitutional practice of issuing a “signing statement” upon signing a bill into law, declaring quietly that since he is commander in chief in the so-called “war” on terror, he doesn’t have to enact laws passed by Congress. He issued one of those little addenda to the torture bill, recall, in which he said he wouldn’t be bound by it.

At the same time, he assured Congress and all Americans that he was repulsed by torture, and that America would never torture.

Turns out that was a flat-out lie. At the urging of über-President Dick Cheney, Bush’s new Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, in 2005, wrote up a memo authorizing all the worst torture abuses—simulated drowning, slapping around and sleep deprivation, for example—which Congress had specifically banned.
That memo came to light yesterday in an article in the New York Times, but now that it’s out there, Bush says again that America doesn’t torture.

Apparently it is all a matter of definition. Bush seems to be implying that if we don’t use a rack, or cut off captives’ sex organs, or tie them on fire ant hills and leave them there to be stung and slowly eaten to death, we’re not torturing.

Now admittedly we’re dealing here with a guy who has difficulty with words and with the English language. Anyone who can confuse “advice” with “device,” or “presented” with “prevented” as Bush did in a talk in Lancaster, PA a few days ago might be forgiven for confusing “torture” with “nurture,” I suppose.

But I don’t think that’s what’s happening here.

I think the president is simply a liar.

more...

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/27464

[thecrow]

1. It depends on what "we" mean by the word "we"....

Picture * with his hands on his chest....
fingers spread in that "honesty, what... me? " pose somebody taught him so well...
with that look of shock and humility on his face...

No.... we don't torture.... it's them liitle
furner guys we re-reconcider, er...
re-edition.. you know.. that r word.... it depends on them. We just fly the terraists over there. We don't torture them.
heh.. heh... heh.....

[Name removed]

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