HOLD BUSH AND CHENEY ACCOUNTABLE


GOP'S DISTRACTIONS ON TORTURE


The method magicians use to perform their tricks is to distract. You focus on something the magician wants you to focus on so he can create his illusion. And so it is with the right wing's distractions on torture. From what you hear in the media, you would think Nancy Pelosi orchestrated this entire reprehensible program. If Nancy Pelosi knew about torture and did nothing to stop it, that is disgusting. But the people who conceived using torture and put torture into operation are far more disgusting and far more legally liable. This commentary by Gregg Levine is at www.firedoglake.com:


Because before you get to Pelosi, or to Graham, or Jane Harman, or a host of other congressional leaders who in good time should be held accountable for their action or inaction during the Bush years—before you get to any of that—one thing had to happen. . . .

Someone had to order the torture. Someone had to sign off on the program in its design phase, someone had to render a group of detainees, hold them outside the reach of US law, and someone had to give the order to have them tortured.

I could, at this point, throw out the name George W. Bush—he was president at the time, after all—but we now have pretty good evidence that the real authority for waterboarding (to name but the most talked about of many illegally brutal “techniques”), the real orders to “do that,” and “do that again,” came from the vice president. The order to torture came from Dick Cheney.

Let me say that again: Dick Cheney ordered torture.

Not Nancy Pelosi; Dick Cheney.

Before there were any briefings of any Democrats, there was the torture—a violation in-and-of itself—and that torture was ordered by Republican Vice President Dick Cheney.

And to take it one step further, that torture wasn’t ordered up to save us from some imagined “ticking bomb” scenario (not that torture would even solve that particular problem, and not that, even if it did, it could be justified), it was ordered to make detainees produce a specific, desired piece of information (or disinformation). Dick Cheney wanted a connection between the attacks of September 11, 2001 and Iraqi leader Sadam Hussein, and so Cheney told interrogators contractors to torture detainees until they stated that there was a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.