U.S. has secretly been engaging in torture.

The NYT has uncovered that President Bush authorized a secret torture program in February 2005 that’s been operating ever since, in utter violation of federal law and an intervening SCOTUS ruling. As we said in elementary school: no doy. Nobody actually believed President Bush when he said that the U.S. doesn’t torture, did they? He was lying then, as no doubt he’ll continue lying about it. Perhaps worse than the torture is that we have a president who is utterly convinced that he’s above the law. He may prove to be right about that.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

10 replies on “U.S. has secretly been engaging in torture.”

  1. I suppose to proponents of the Foreign Terrorist Bill of Rights, er, I mean the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, this is a big deal. For the rest of us: Zzzzzzz.

  2. Everything out of George W. Bush’s mouth is a lie… it is only a matter of time before the truth of each lie comes out.

    The only question is, will the office of the presidency ever be trusted again?

  3. At first they came for the Islamofascists, but I was not an Islamofascist…

    I’m trembling.

  4. You know JS, you’re right, but why stop at torture? Lets rape their women and make leather goods from their hides when we’re done! It’ll help demoralize the enemy and win this war.

  5. Under Bush, we’ve gone from “shining city on a hill” to “filthy village in the valley — but, hey, we’re better than Saddam Hussein and those Al Qaeda guys!” I’m proud to be an American!

  6. It’s so odd how conservatives, who love to rail about the ineffectiveness and unreliability of government, are so enthusiastic about giving the government unrestrained power to lock people up without any recourse. Why is the government to be trusted implicitly to determine that someone is a terrorist (without any oversight, or trial, or presentation of evidence)but isn’t to be trusted to provide education, health care, or infrastructure?

  7. Katey, that’s easy: because the government is more efficient at summarily locking folks up than it is at providing education, health care, or infrastructure. (Where’s the harm in letting it do what it’s best at?)

  8. Hey Smails, quick question.

    I know your in BlackOps mode today, with your cavalier statements about the torturing of your fellow humans (No wait, the people in question here are not white Americans, so the fellow human does not apply, my bad…guess I need to stop reading those liberal based books of the Bible and stick with the ‘Book of Redneck’), but while you are cleaning the paint ball shrapnel off your BDU’s, tell us Oh Secret SEAL, where do you draw the line?

    America used to be defined not so much by what we did, but what we did not do. Stories about knocks at the door that took a father away, never to return…were in novels about Russia or Nazi Germany.

    You scoff at the famous ‘First they came for…’ and you know what, I used to do that as well. The day it made sense to me was on a tour of Dachau some 20 years ago. Standing in the oven room, looking at a picture of the spot I was standing stacked to the ceiling with bodies and a roaring fire in the open oven behind it…at that moment I got it.

    I don’t expect anything to EVER change your mind as long as you confuse compassion with weakness.

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