Bob Herbert

Yeah, except I've talked to She-Swine and other repiglikkkan idiots about torture, and they think it's a good thing. A direct quote from She-swine "Well, the Geneva Conventions don't apply to terrorists." This is a fine example of the kind of non thought that comes from faithful viewing of Faux News, and faithful submission to the rules of the patriarchy.
Bleeech.

Secrets and Shame
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Ultimately the whole truth will come out and historians will have their say,
and Americans will look in the mirror and be ashamed.
Abraham Lincoln spoke of the "better angels" of our nature. George W. Bush
will have none of that. He's set his sights much, much lower.
The latest story from the Dante-esque depths of this administration was
front-page news in The Washington Post yesterday. The reporter, Dana Priest,
gave us the best glimpse yet of the extent of the secret network of prisons
in which the CIA has been hiding and interrogating terror suspects. The
network includes a facility at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe.
"The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's
unconventional war on terrorism," wrote Ms. Priest. "It depends on the
cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic
information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and
nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert
actions."
The individuals held in these prisons have been deprived of all rights. They
don't even have the basic minimum safeguards of prisoners of war. If they
are being tortured or otherwise abused, there is no way for the outside
world to know about it. If some mistake has been made and they are, in fact,
innocent of wrongdoing - too bad.
As Ms. Priest wrote, "Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the
facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how
decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long."
This is the border along which democracy bleeds into tyranny.
Some of the prisoners being held by the CIA are no doubt murderous
individuals who, given the opportunity, would do tremendous harm. There are
others, however, whose links to terrorist activities are dubious at best,
and perhaps nonexistent.
The CIA's original plan was to hide and interrogate maybe two or three dozen
top leaders of Al Qaeda who were directly involved in the Sept. 11 attacks
or were believed to pose an imminent threat. It turned out that many more
people were corralled by the CIA for one reason or another. Their terror
ties and intelligence value were less certain. But they were thrown into the
secret prisons, nevertheless.
A number of current and former officials told The Washington Post that "the
original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was
lowered or ignored."
The secret CIA prisons are just one link in the long chain of abominations
that the Bush administration has unrolled in its so-called fight against
terrorism. Rendition, the outsourcing of torture to places like Egypt,
Jordan and Syria, is another. And then there are the thousands upon
thousands of detainees being held at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, in Afghanistan
and in Iraq. There is little, if any, legal oversight of these detainees, or
effective monitoring of the conditions in which they are being held.
Terrible instances of torture and other forms of abuse of detainees have
come to light. The Pentagon has listed the deaths of at least 27 prisoners
in American custody as confirmed or suspected criminal homicides.
None of this has given the administration pause. It continues to go out of
its way to block a legislative effort by Senator John McCain, the Arizona
Republican, to ban the "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of any
prisoner in US custody.
I had a conversation yesterday with Michael Posner, executive director of
Human Rights First, about the secret CIA prisons. "We're a nation founded on
laws and rules that say you treat people humanely," he said, "and among the
safeguards is that people in detention should be formally recognized; they
should have access, at a minimum, to the Red Cross; and somebody should be
accountable for their treatment.
"What we've done is essentially to throw away the rule book and say that
there are some people who are beyond the law, beyond scrutiny, and that the
people doing the detentions and interrogations are totally unaccountable.
It's a secret process that almost inevitably leads to abuse."
Worse stories are still to come - stories of murder, torture and abuse.
We'll watch them unfold the way people watch the aftermath of terrible
accidents. And then we'll ask, "How could this have happened?"