Connecting Dots

Here's an awfully good article on the recent developments on the torture thing. I haven't yet had time to digest all the information, but one of the things that really stands out is the approval process for the use of torture ("enhanced interrogation" for those engrossed in semantics): When we want to torture someone (and it is torture he said, no one involved with these techniques would ever think anything different), we have to write it up. The team leader of the torture team proposes what torture techniques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Operations at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hierarchy of the Company. Then the proposal is passed to the Justice Department to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Security Council in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose personal authority is invoked for each and every instance of torture authorized. And, according to Kiriakou as well as others, Bush’s answer is never “no.” He has never found a case where he didn’t find torture was appropriate. Here’s a key piece of the Kiriakou statement: LAUER: Was the White House involved in that decision? (approving torture) KIRIAKOU: Absolutely, this isn’t something done willy nilly. It’s not something that an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he’s going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner. This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department. If that isn't both damning and embarrassing, I'm not sure what else to say. There is also the interesting discussion of King James I's The Kings's Booke, written in 1606. Horton cites the portion where James describes torture in order of increasing severity: ...thumbscrews, the rack and waterboarding. That’s right. Waterboarding was considered the most severe of the official forms of torture. Worse than the rack and thumbscrews. In the depraved humor of Dick Cheney, of course, it’s just bobbing for apples at a Halloween Fair. Sigh.