US: So What if We Break Our Promise

So the President says that we will not prosecute the CIA torturers (nor, it appears the people who ordered them to torture), thus breaking the promise we made in the UN Convention against Torture to do so. The discussion of this issue by the President and in the press has been apalling. So what if they were "ordered" to torture and therefore shouldn't be punished. Did we accept this excuse from the Nazis at Nuremburg? No. As Mr. Nowak says in the article:

"The fact that you carried out an order doesn't relieve you of your responsibility," he was quoted as saying by AP news agency.

Torture and the Bush Administration

This short article makes it very clear that we were torturing prisoners. I call anyone who disagrees (including John Yoo, author of the infamous "Torture Memo") to undergo what these guys did and say it is not torture.

What we can say with certainty, in the wake of the Red Cross report, is that the United States tortured prisoners and that the Bush administration, including the president himself, explicitly and aggressively denied that fact.

Waterboarding IS Torture

Christopher Hitchens has been a supporter of the Bush "War on Terror" from the beginning so it's pretty significant that he undergoes waterboarding himself and declares in no uncertain terms that it is torture:

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

I've always said that if our fearless leaders (Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez, Rumsfeld) felt that waterboarding was not torture that they should lead by example and undergo it themselves. So much for our moral leadership in the world...

Ashcroft Confronted on Waterboarding

Too bad it takes a college student to point out the hypocrisy of using waterboarding when we sent at least one Japanese officer to prison for 15 years for virtually the same torture.

Losing Our Soul Little By Little

Sixty years ago waterboarding was a war crime, today it is an "aggressive" but appropriate interrogation technique. We are not making progress. This article says in part, In 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.
Mr. Asano was sentenced to 15 years at hard labor!