The U.S. doesn't "torture"
If you haven't read the NYT report today on the collusion of the Alberto Gonzales Justice Department with the White House and Office of Vice President to legally sanction torture even after the famous Bybee torture memo had been withdrawn, then please take a look.
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.
Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.
So in other words, if Congress tells the Bushies that they can't torture people, they just ignore that. They issue a secret memo that nobody else can see which states that although we can't torture people, whatever the Bushies do isn't "torture." See how that works? It isn't torture because they say it isn't. And by the way, they aren't going to tell you anything about it.
This is the really scary shit. Seriously. This is the stuff of totalitarian regimes. I'm not quick to start throwing around the fascist references, but this really is the kind of stuff that they do. Not good. We're starting to move on from Orwell to Kafka territory here...
P.S. This really brings me a lot of nostagia for the Clinton years, where the republicans were all in a tizzy about Clinton's supposed legalistic defenses against the political lynching they had instigated. "Depends what the definition of is is" was a big punch line. Boy, I wish we were all worrying about that kind of stuff now instead of legalistic defenses of torture and corruption.
