Posted by Tina
The progressive left has been having conniption fits for years now, screaming and hollaring torture every chance they get and vowing to prosecute members of the Bush administration for war crimes. In the process they have undermined our efforts against terrorists and smeared the good name of America and the Bush administration memebers. They have also conveniently ignored past history. Columnists, Network News outlets, the ACLU and even members of Congress made extraordianry rendition equivalent to the act of flying planes into the towers…possibly worse:
Andrew Sullivan:
Bush: ‘This government does not torture’ – CNN
** On Capitol Hill, Democratic lawmakers sharply criticized the Bush administration.
“It appears that under Attorney General Gonzales, they reversed themselves and reinstated a secret regime by, in essence, reinterpreting the law in secret,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont. *** “I suspect that former Deputy Attorney General Comey will again prove to be right in his prediction that the Department of Justice will be ashamed when we learn more about all that they have done,” Leahy said. **
** Recent ACLU-compelled disclosures of previously concealed DOJ documents reveal many of the details of what has been long known: that the highest levels of the Bush administration secretly implemented an illegal torture regime. But while those torture programs began in secret, we have gradually learned more and more about them.. *** Indeed, it has long been known that we are torturing, holding detainees in secret prisons beyond the reach of law and civilization, sending detainees to the worst human rights abusers to be tortured, and subjecting them ourselves to all sorts of treatment which both our own laws and the treaties to which we are a party plainly prohibit. None of this is new. **
Report: Torture started with Bush, by Mark Benjamin Salon
** On Thursday, as the incoming Obama administration is mulling whether or not it even should investigate torture under the Bush administration, the Senate Armed Services Committee released the executive summary of its own investigation of the treatment of U.S. detainees. (The full report is still being declassified.) *** The report is all about naming names, and the summary is stunningly frank in its conclusions, particularly in comparison to the passive language employed by most government investigations into abuse. *** According to the report, the torture ball started rolling with the president and his Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum stating that the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to al-Qaida or the Taliban. The CIA and the Department of Defense began scurrying to establish their brutal interrogation regimes, while the White House and top Bush administration officials brushed aside legal hurdles and approved specific, horrifying techniques. **
Sounds pretty bad all right…Bush must be a monster!!!
Or is he just like other presidents in the recent past? Eli Lake has the answer to that compelling question in the following article:
**President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for CIA director, Leon Panetta, served as White House chief of staff during the time the Clinton administration accelerated a practice of kidnapping terrorist suspects and sending them to countries with records of torturing prisoners, human rights organizations and former U.S. officials say. *** Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will question Mr. Panetta, chief of staff for President Clinton from 1994 to 1997, about what, if any, role he played in shaping the policy known as “extraordinary rendition,” a Republican aide on the committee said. Mr. Panetta’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for Jan. 27. The aide asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue. *** The practice — which involves seizing a terrorist suspect in one country and taking him to another without formal judicial proceedings — also occurred under the administration of President George H.W. Bush and possibly even earlier, said a former senior U.S. official in that administration. However, it took place dozens of times under the Clinton administration and rose dramatically after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to human rights organizations and former national security officials. **