April 24, 2012

Lest we forget, Christian President George Bush tortured early, often, and indiscriminately

Haven't talked about torture since the last time a Republican defended it--and that would be just a few months back.  The leadership of the party thinks that torture is acceptable and even moral. And why should they not?  It polls well among their base, as we have also discussed.

But a reminder of what these people did in our name:

Bush ordered the torture early in the war, and did so over the objections of moral people all along the way. To do so, they found lawyers to simply write briefs saying the torture was legal.

Then they tortured. They tortured men at military bases and detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Guantánamo, and in U.S. Navy bases on American soil; they tortured men in secret CIA prisons set up across the globe specifically to terrorize and torture prisoners; they sent many more to countries with notoriously abusive regimes and asked them to do the torturing. At least twice, after the torturers themselves concluded there was no point to further abuse, Washington ordered that the prisoners be tortured some more.
They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture. They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.
You get that?  They didn't just torture Khalid Sheik Muhammed, they tortured innocent people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  They tortured people who had a tenuous connection to torture, and they did it when there was no imminent threat.  The sadists we elected in 2000 and 2004 overrode the torturers in two cases and ordered more pain and more abuse.

Need I remind you these are the same people most likely to quote from the Bible as they run for office?  Most likely to talk about their "personal relationship" with Jesus as they authorize or defend torture?  Most likely to talk about "moral values" and their decline as they order some innocent person shackled by wrist and ankle to a D-ring in the middle of the floor and then induce hypothermia.

The Republican party is the party of torture.  They love it.  They want to do more of it.

2 comments:

Noah said...

The Obama administration has done or not done some stuff that miffs me, but I expect that. I do not believe my leaders, even ones I like or voted for, are infallible. Plus, I'm a thinking human being, so even if I like a leader like Obama, I can still be upset when he does or doesn't do something that irks me. He ain't perfect any more than I am, which is pretty far from it.

But one of the things that really really really irks me is how he turned a blind-eye to the previous administration's engagement in torture and let a bunch of those folks off the hook. I wasn't salivating for an Obama administration full take-down of every moment of the preceding 8 years; that'd be a bit much and a bit of pots and kettles and blackness. But at the very least, I thought some heads would finally roll over this torture thing.

Nope.

steves said...

I agree, Smitty. It isn't enough to say that it won't happen again. I wonder how many of those that tortured are still employed by the US government. It also bothers me that we are still torturing by proxy. Rendition is still happening and some news reports even say it is happening a lot more than it was in the past.