TORTURE AND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

UPDATE: Listen to Mark Danner describe how George Bush lied about torture and the reasons for it. Begin at 5:05: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9XExzfjV3w

I've visited some conservative blogs and was amused to read on one of them that Mr. Obama should be impeached because he has proposed offloading veterans to private insurance. Impeachment because of a "proposal?"

Also, I've heard absolutely nothing about the fact that Mr. Bush has no mention whatsoever of the Iraq War on his Presidential Library bio. None. So much for the sacrifices of our brave men and women. Mr. Bush refuses to acknowledge them, apparently.

But the lack of coverage on conservative blogs [to be fair, I have not read all of them, but the ones I do read have not covered this topic] over Bush's torture policies and the absolute REAL criminality of them is what truly astounds me.

Just a day after former vice-president Dick Cheney appeared on CNN to say President Barack Obama's reversal of the Bush policies was putting the United States in danger, The New York Review of Books published an article by Mark Danner. The macabre accounts of torture in the report aren't emerging from totalitarian dictatorships or Dark Ages gallows - this was the 21st century CIA, with the full knowledge of senior officials in George W. Bush's administration, according to a secret Red Cross 43-page report from February 2007, and based on interviews with detainees at the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, .

In the report, the Red Cross says the prisoner accounts constitute repeated violations of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions. The organization is the appointed legal guardian of the Geneva Conventions and oversees the treatment of prisoners of war.

"The ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture," Danner quoted the report as saying.Many of the details of alleged mistreatment at CIA prisons had been reported previously, but the ICRC report is the most authoritative account and the first to use the word "torture" in a legal context.
The leaked report has prompted renewed calls for Cheney and Bush to be charged with war crimes.

***************

"Bush and Cheney were, in fact, more brutal in their 'enhanced interrogation' than the Gestapo was," Andrew Sullivan wrote Monday on The Atlantic website.

"When the U.S. captured officials who had done to prisoners exactly what the last president did, the U.S. prosecuted them, found them guilty and executed them. The price Cheney pays is a fawning interview on CNN."

In the early months of 2008, the American public learned that the highest officials in the US government actually plotted, in the White House, ingenious ways to break US and international laws and torture al Qaeda detainees in order to get information from them.

I didn't hear 24/7 coverage of this scandal as I did during the Clinton/Lewinsky debacle. Maybe if some of the principals were having sex at the same time that they were discussing torture methods, America would have been fascinated by this astounding piece of news.

The national chest-thumpers who bellow 24/7 that this is "The Greatest Country In The World" have no right to their bellowing. During the Bush years, we sank to the level of our most execrable enemies and dishonored the men and women who died protecting what this country stood for. Under the Bush administration, we betrayed our highest principles.

In a time of extreme danger and threat, this country gave up its moral authority.