Image via Wikipedia Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former president George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate responsibility for approving the simulated drownings of CIA detainees, a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture.
In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.
Bush previously had acknowledged endorsing what he described as the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation techniques - a term meant to encompass irregular, coercive methods - after Justice Department officials and other top aides assured him they were legal. "I was a big supporter of waterboarding,"Eric Holder, the current attorney general of the US, in January 2009:
Asked just minutes into his confirmation hearings whether waterboarding qualified as torture, Holder was unequivocal in his response.
"If you look at the history of the use of that technique used by the Khmer Rouge, used in the inquisition, used by the Japanese and prosecuted by us as war crimes, we prosecuted our own soldiers in Vietnam, I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture.
I'm sure Bush's lawyers gave him the OK on this. He must be certain that the DOJ and the Obama Administration won't touch him. That the International Court won't file Human Rights violations. Torture has never been a particularly effective intelligence-collection technique, it's only real purposes are usually for humiliation or revenge.
Torture and secrecy. Where one is used, the other is indispensable. It weakened the standing of our Country, helped recruit and radicalize our enemies and made us all complicit in it. Torture is soul-destroying for both the tortured and the torturer and is morally corrupting to the country that sponsors it.
I feel his owning this is just evidence that he still doesn't get it. Won't get it. Is incapable of getting it. It's wrong. Legally, ethically, empirically and morally wrong!
I feel his owning this is just evidence that he still doesn't get it. Won't get it. Is incapable of getting it. It's wrong. Legally, ethically, empirically and morally wrong!
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