24th Apr 2009
Torture: the skinny
Aric Clark at Two Friars and a Fool has provided a pretty comprehensive summary of the torture news. Reposting, in its entirety, A Deluge of Torture:
It has been a positive deluge of news about torture lately. In case you’ve been living under a rock, I have collected some salient points for you to consider.
Firstly, the United States government has tortured people. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross it was systematic and widespread.
The use of torture was supposedly justified by legal opinions issued by the Justice Department in 2003.
But the legal opinions were both wrong, and too late. Because according to the Senate Armed Services Committee torture was being planned and implemented in early 2002.
Which means that the memos weren’t a carefully considered response to an early inquiry from eager intelligence officials, but an attempt to silence dissent from within the CIA when interrogators questioned the legality (and morality) of torture.
Torture had always been the plan. In fact, the Bush administration, starting from the very top, was preparing to use torture from just a few months after 9/11/2001, and were urging its implementation to attempt to find an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.
Of course the link never materialized and the early CIA uses of torture bled into the military and were widely practiced in Iraq and Afghanistan which means that Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Bush lied and the Abu Ghraib incident was not just a few bad apples.
Can there be any doubt that prosecutions must follow? Let’s hope the senate wises up and follows Patrick Leahy’s plan.
Also, there’s a useful timeline over at Daily Kos: What We Know So Far: A Torture Timeline, starting from August 2001.
Leave a Reply