The Bush White House’s appalling and evil legacy
AlterNet
by Frank Rich
04/27/09
We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: ‘By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.’ When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right. Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to ‘24;’ that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks...
http://tinyurl.com/d47oha
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bush+legacy
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Robert+Mueller
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=torture
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Mark+Danner
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Frank+Rich+Times
by Frank Rich
04/27/09
We’ve learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: ‘By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.’ When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right. Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government’s highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to ‘24;’ that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks...
http://tinyurl.com/d47oha
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Bush+legacy
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Obama
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Robert+Mueller
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=torture
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Mark+Danner
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Frank+Rich+Times
rudkla - 28. Apr, 11:27
