Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country. We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being.
-- President George W. Bush, June 22, 2004
Earlier this week, the New York Times published an article that proves the above statement a lie.
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture "abhorrent" in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
A secret legal opinion? WTF is that? A more honest description might be "a legal defense, loaded and ready to fire, on the off-chance that we wind up facing charges over this."
During his confirmation hearing, future (and former) Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a hint of the administrations' mindset when it came to torture. After Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested that torture might possibly be a bad thing and that we probably shouldn't do it, Gonzales said, "...I would respectfully disagree with your statement that we're becoming more like our enemy. We are nothing like our enemy, Senator. While we are struggling to try to find out at Abu Ghraib, they're beheading people like Danny Pearl and Nick Berg. We are nothing like our enemy."
So, as long as we're not sawing people's heads off, we're cool? Considering that terrorists will stop at absolutely nothing, this reasoning means that if we're willing to stop at anything -- no matter how extreme the action before we hit that limit -- then that's cool. If terrorists douse people in gasoline and light them up, we can do the same -- if we put goggles on them first, so we don't get the gas in their eyes. We are not, after all, barbarians...
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