i want to puke with rage
Logically, there must be some point at which the actions of the Bush administration stop shocking me. A few people have spilled ink about outrage fatigue; the scandalous revelations of misconduct and terrible decisions over the last 8 years were so widespread and relentless that even the most dedicated of Bush haters had a hard time keeping up with it all. Believe me, I tried.
But no, they were worse than my most ungenerous assumptions.
One of the takeaways of the torture memos is that we tortured some prisoners hundreds of times. There are not a lot of reasons to do that. Even the assholes who insist that torture produces useful intelligence (and it doesn’t) have to argue that the purpose of the torture is to get fast cooperation and data about imminent threats; that simply doesn’t apply if you’re torturing someone 6 times a day for more than a month.
So why keep it up?
Why, to prove the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, of course.
Anyone paying a modicum of attention knew that Bush and the PNAC krewe who adopted him in the late 90s wanted to invade Iraq well before 9-11. They didn’t keep it a secret or anything. We knew that they were using 9-11 as a pretext to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9-11.
But at my very most cynical I didn’t think they would simply torture POWs to obtain false confessions to “prove” that nonexistent link.
As Paul Krugman points out, the word for this is “evil”. This is unquestionably the kind of shit that we executed people for doing in WWII.
All I can say is, GAAAAAAAAAHHH.
The good news is that these newly released memos add to the growing pile of hard evidence against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. At some point that evidence becomes too clear to simply ignore, and prosecution becomes inevitable. This isn’t just some vague legal question about what constitutes torture or whether the legal advice given by the previous administrations lawyers can be retroactively superseded by the current administrations lawyers. If and when it becomes completely clear that they tortured INNOCENT people with the intention of gaining FALSE confessions, at that point I think a grand jury will be convened.