A former State Department lawyer has told the Associated Press that the Bush administration "panicked" after 9/11 and tortured prisoners. Vijay Padmanabhan is said to be "at least the second insider to publicly describe as torture the so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' used by the U.S.""Guantanamo was one of the worst overreactions of the Bush administration," Padmanabhan told AP, adding that it was "foolish" for the administration to argue that detainees were outside the US legal system or the Geneva Conventions.
Further:
Last week, another former official in the Bush State Department publicly criticized the administration for its Guantanamo policies.
Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, said many detainees locked up in the prison camp were innocent swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants
"There are still innocent people there," Wilkerson told The Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven years."
Worse, the administration knew they were innocent, but didn't care. "It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance," Wilkerson wrote on his blog. Analysts, Wilkerson says, hoped to use these innocent detainees to gather "sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified."
Guantanamo isn't a prison, it's a database. Anyone who remembers Bush's "deer in the headlights" moment on 9/11 won't have much trouble believing he freaked uot because he was in way over his head. The scary thing is that cooler heads didn't prevail, because there apparently weren't any cooler heads in the White House.
On that day -- and on most days afterward -- there wasn't anyone in the Bush administration who was up to the job.
