Bush Is OK With Torture, But the Rest of the World Isn’t
Well, the cat’s out of the bag now: the United States of America tortures. We did it, we think it’s okay that we did it, and we’d do it again. This is hardly news since Canada knew that we tortured and the international media knew that we tortured. Even some Americans outside of the Bush Bubble knew that we tortured. So the White House can no longer say “The United States does not torture” and be taken seriously, but they’re okay with that.
Unfortunately for Bush & Co., the rest of the world isn’t:
“This is absolutely unacceptable under international human rights law,” said Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture. “Time has come that the government will actually acknowledge that they did something wrong and not continue trying to justify what is unjustifiable.”
…Nowak, who has clashed with the U.S. over his failed efforts to investigate at Guantanamo Bay, said he has received more allegations of waterboarding. But he said he did not have proof to back up those allegations, partly because the U.S. will not allow him to speak with high-level terror detainees who were previously held in CIA-run secret prisons.
“If it concerns secret places of detention, it is very difficult to prove,” Nowak told The Associated Press by telephone from Vienna, Austria. He added that all allegations of waterboarding were from the “early years” of the war on terror, consistent with Hayden’s testimony.
The United Nations official charged with investigating allegations of torture has been prevented by my government from fully investigating the United States (not that I expect the Bush Administration to respect the UN), but he can still conclude that the U.S. government is illegally torturing detainees. And the problem goes far beyond simply waterboarding:
“I’m not particularly worried about waterboarding. If it’s now three cases of 10, it doesn’t make much of a difference,” he said. “It’s the whole attitude, of course, of downplaying their interrogation methods and trying to justify them still.”
…
“The evidence is so clear … and the legal evidence is as clear,” Nowak said. “I’m not willing anymore to discuss these questions with the U.S. government, when they still say that this is allowed. It’s not allowed.
The rest of the world doesn’t buy in to this myth of “if the President says we don’t do it, I guess we don’t do it.” The rest of the world doesn’t listen to the Attorney General’s refusal to say whether or not torture is legal and respond with “Oh, well it must be legal or he’d say it’s illegal.” The rest of the world has put all the pieces of the puzzle together.
The United States government uses waterboarding. Waterboarding is torture. Torture is illegal. The United States government broke the law.
A parting message to all those Bush apologists who said that we had to believe President Bush when he said we didn’t torture, that what we did wasn’t illegal, and that there was no proof of any wrongdoing: you were lied to, you were wrong, and yes there is.
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[...] (Cross-posted at CrazyDrumGuy) [...]
Comment posted at 2/6/08 at 4:53 pm