Weasel Zippers: Sticking someone in a box with a caterpillar isn’t torture,
sticking someone in a box with Helen Thomas is torture…….
Courtesy of Sheik Yer’Mami and ZIP
BOSTON — Shock and shame is the only way to react to the latest revelations of the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation of suspected terrorists. As the world now knows, torture techniques — approved by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — were exposed in four memos released by the Justice Department under a court order obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union. Much as President Barack Obama wants to move on and to forget the unsavory history of the preceding administration, he has to face up to its ugly reality. The Bush administration’s legal memos revealed that almost anything went when it came to dealing with the captives in U.S. hands, including water boarding — a mode of simulated drowning, slamming prisoners against walls and placing a prisoner fearful of insects in a box crawling with caterpillars. What sadist in our government thought of such barbaric tactics, and in our name? Who are these people? Interrogators apparently could do anything to humiliate the captives, who had never been charged, tried, or convicted. The interrogators were CIA agents and one wonders whether they all put their consciences in a blind trust. For all that, Obama’s first inclination was to let bygones be bygones and not be burdened by the Bush administration’s questionable past.Rest here>>>
