Torture State Ctd.

Sullivan again:

I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated,
constructed or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way
George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that
the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply
disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith. When you place it
alongside the Red Cross' debriefing of the torture victims, the fit is almost
perfect. I say "almost" because even Jay Bybee, in this unprofessional travesty
of lawyering, stipulates that these techniques might be combined successively in
any ways that could cumulatively become torture even in his absurd redefinition
of the term. And yet the ICRC report shows, as one might imagine, that outside
these specious legalisms, such distinctions never hold in practice. And they
didn't. Human beings were contorted into classic stress positions used by the
Gestapo; they had towels tied around their necks in order to smash their bodies
against walls; they were denied of all sleep for up to eleven days and nights at
a time; they were stuck in tiny suffocating boxes; they were waterboarded just
as the victims of the Khmer Rouge were waterboarded. And through all this, Bush
and Cheney had lawyers prepared to write elaborate memos saying that all of this
was legal, constitutional, moral and not severe pain and suffering.

Bybee is not representing justice in this memo. He is
representing the president. And the president is seeking to commit war crimes.
And he succeeded. This much we now know beyond any reasonable doubt. It is a
very dark day for this country, but less dark than every day since Cheney
decided to turn the US into a torturing country until now.