Torture Policy: A future Congress will apologize (Galloway)

[struggle4progress]

<snip> Powerful men debated over what amount of mistreatment or pressure might constitute torture. Snarling dogs were OK. The water board that semi-drowns a prisoner might be OK. Twenty hours of nonstop interrogation by yelling and screaming guards was fine.

Rumsfeld thought making a prisoner stand for four hours straight wasn't nearly enough; how about eight hours? he asked. Naked prisoners locked for days in a very cold room? Not a problem. Some lawyer even wrote that the infliction of severe pain wasn't really torture unless it matched in intensity with organ failure or death. <snip>

The powerful men who set all this in motion all rushed to denounce criminal acts committed by a few, a very few, bad people in soldier uniforms. Court-martial them and put them away and everything's just fine.

Actually it isn't fine, and it won't be until our government backs away from the abyss that lawless acts constitute. <snip>

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/10835367.htm

[Cocoa]

1. abu Ghraib will be in the history books for sure

lots of pictures to illustrate this sad episode, one of the pictures might be Gonzales.

[indepat]

2. Any future Congressional apology will ring hollow for the Congress

approved Gonzales' nomination as AG and other torture advocates will almost certainly be confirmed to high administration posts.

[marcologico]

3. Probably the same Congress that gets to pay down the national

debt, repair our alliances, address global warming, get the mercury and dioxin out of the air and water, save what's left of the forests and shut down the prison industrial complex.

That's going to be one helluva busy Congress.

[car54whereareyou]

4. Thanks

for my only laugh of today, so far!

[Vitruvius]

5. And that apology will only be meaningful if we also render Bu$h, Rumsfeld,

Cheney, Gonzales, Rice, and the rest of the criminal gang for trial at the International Court in the Hague.