Torture

I have not written much about the codified torture regimes that have been practiced by the United States in the past few years because well, it bothers me too much. Now with the torture memos and legal opinions public it is clear that everything that was guessed at was in fact - true. The punishment of those "bad apples" at Abu Ghraib was only because a) they got caught and b) they were not torturing "right." Meaning they didn't put a neck brace on their victim before they slammed them into a wall.

The administration at the very top ordered and organized a system of torture to get the info they wanted, like a link between Sadam and 9/11. Not to prevent a ticking-time-bomb "24" type scenario that always gets thrown around. And of course, that is what torture does and has always done - generate false confessions. But some how, our government took the SERE program, which uses the knowledge we learned from our enemies about how to generate false confessions to prevent false confessions in military situations, and applied it to our prisoners. Which generated false confessions, and false intelligence.

And the wording and language used to make torture OK is really something amazing. So, with out saying more, here is someone singing the passage on waterboarding.




EDIT: Andrew Sullivan who has been a very vocal critic of torture policies, writes a powerful condemnation of the entire ideology of power and torture that the Bush administration created.