"the United States does not engage in torture. We do use enhanced interrogation techniques."

and the Nazi's did not engage in gassing Jews, they just used "advanced showering techniques"...

RichM

Excellent observation, When I read; "...the next president should feel obliged to give a full accounting of the Bush administration's disgraceful transgressions. Then he or she will begin the task of assuring the world that such things will not happen again..." I thought that imprisonment might be a tad more likely to discourage a repeat of the Bush-Cheney eight year crime spree.

RichM, what would happen to their campaigns if they did notice these transgressions took place? At least Obama was bold enough to be the only candidate to unequivocably state his opposition to torture under any circumstance.

kathyodat

None of the rosy predictions about candidates Clinton, Obama, and McCain are backed up by their actions in the Senate.

This article does a mediocre job of saying what we all should know: torture is immoral, illegal and serves no other purpose but to terrorise.

…Then, I believe, it makes a big goof. It claims that all the candidates vow to end torture. A previous article, however, on CommonDreams quotes what three of them say in response to the "ticking time bomb" scenario. I believe only one of them rules out torture.

Can you spot which one?

Here's how three candidates said they'd handle the "ticking time bomb" thought-experiment:

McCain: "Should [an interrogator use torture] and thereby save an American city or prevent another 9/11, authorities and the public would surely take this into account when judging his actions and recognize the extremely dire situation he confronted."

Hillary Clinton: "Those are very rare, but if they occur, there has to be some lawful authority for pursuing it ….[If] we have sufficient basis to believe that there is something imminent, yeah, but then we've got to have a check and balance on that."

Obama :"The secret authorization of brutal interrogations is an outrageous betrayal of our core values, and a grave danger to our security …torture is not a part of the answer - it is a fundamental part of the problem …. Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them. Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence … When I am president America will …[stand] up to these deplorable tactics. When I am president we won't work in secret to avoid honoring our laws and Constitution, we will be straight with the American people and true to our values."

------------------

They're all captives of the ruling fascist oligarchy.

Maybe the real reason CIA destroyed the tapes is that torturing these prisoners did not yield any useful information. Imagine how embarrassing that would be.

Thank you, jlocke.

How do we define our country's values?

Torture is acceptable to protect ourselves from a perceived danger.

It is acceptable to invade another country to secure their resources for our use.

We meddle in the internal affairs of other countries using the CIA to overthrow democracies and support dictatorships, including assassinations, for the benefit of corporate profits.

Our foreign aid is used to coerce small countries to support our political and corporate agendas.

We are the largest weapons suppliers in the world. Most of our foreign aid is in the form of weapons.

We refuse to sign treaties banning land mines, cluster bombs and child soldiers. We market the above mines and bombs.

Most Americans think we promote democracy and freedom around the world and that we're the greatest country on Earth.

kathyodat

I think we should concede the moral high ground to the right wingers...so long as they stipulate that they attained the moral high ground by waging a campaign of lying, cheating, stealing, torturing and murdering.

Their love of torture is another indication of their cowardice (Cheney's five draft deferments) and their sadism (Bush blowing up frogs as a kid and branding the rear of a fellow frat brother in an initiation ceremony in college.)

Bush and Cheney have always been completely amoral, without any moral grounding the power of the White House has completely corrupted their souls. Remember that they used a premeditated campaign of lies to launch a war of aggression, the highest of all crimes against humanity. Which is the bigger crime, waterboarding three bad guys or the deaths of one million innocent Iraqi civilians?

Is it not astounding that our politicians, press, commentators, all have been speaking endlessly about torture and waterboarding, without nary a word about the ongoing slaughter of thousands of innocent people in the Middle East and elsewhere, and all in the name of the American People, and their so-called "interests"?

Gene, you can't ever ensure that these things never happen again. Human evil is too pervasive. But you/we can make them less likely -- by punishing the perpetrators. Impeachment is apparently off the table for good. Criminal prosecution should not be, all the way up the chain of command. If DOJ won't do it, the Hague should, or any other country, a la Pinochet.

Anyone connected in any way to this tragedy needs to be arrested, indicted and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
IT IS WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It is a disgrace in the extreme that the people involved sit around "the oval table" and discuss ways to hurt other human beings, defend it and escape any responsibility for it.

I just saw a letter to the editor in the Seattle paper this morning (maybe it was yesterday's paper, don't remember) from a conservative Republican who was using McCain's anti-torture sentiments as a CRITICISM of McCain, a reason why he did NOT trust him to "defend America against terrorists" (my paraphrase from memory).

Bush and his myrmidons may use euphemisms like "enhanced interrogation" while saying "we don't torture" ... but at the grassroots hard right level they know what it means, they call it torture ... and are for it.

God help us all.

What has been left unsaid is the role of racism in the use of torture techniques used to extract information or punish detainees. If the inmates at Gitmo had been Whites the rule of law would have prevailed. Since these were citizens of third world countries with laws and customs alien to Western norms they had the book thrown at them plus what ever else that was handy at the time.

The problem with this is that though it gives us the satisfaction of feeling that we have been avenged it does diminish the values that we have espoused. Eventually the loosers will be us.

www.tortureisamoralissue.org

National Religious Campaign Against Torture

when the ecumenical community comes together on an issue - regardless of one's view of religion- it is a positive sign.

"All, I am confident, are bad people who wish to do great harm to the United States."

'bad people' because they want you the hell out of their backyard?

If I were unwise enough to state what I wish would happen to the clique of the current administration I have no doubt that I would spend the rest of my life rotting in a political prison. Or would be completely "disappeared" from this existance.

One is always impressed by the Democratic congress and its timidity, take about wishy washy. They haven't made a move to impeach Bush given mountains of evidence, they are not putting any brakes on the war in Iraq, they obviously agree with Bush on torture and other breaches of civilized conduct. Neither Dem candidate have took anything like a moral stand, has society at large become so amoral from listening to the right wing press and tub thumpers? The front running Repub, McCain is a hollow man a creation of the PR boys, one hears of rumors of his POW time that are in contrast to his bio and image and this is not coming from a dem. group.
It is slim pickin's come November. This November the Transactional Party will win where everything is for sale, everything in keeping with the motto of "the business of America is business". One day they will be building walls/fences to keep people in and by calling it patriotic it will sell like hotcakes. I have lost faith in the governments of this country, it has not been goverment by the people, for the people for a long time.

The truth will out, on 911 and the infinitely greater truths of what the USA has been getting away with for many decades. But first we must finally realize why our system has failed: we have made the same error the Soviets did, allowing the tyranny of a single party political machine .......Difference is we have Two Wings to ours. Big Deal, its a system guaranteed to fail us. We MUST reorganize our representation system to include Minority Parties at all times: like the "parliamentary" systems around the world do. Is this so hard for us to understand? Oh yeah, don't forget the need for the banning of for-profit political propaganda....managed by neutral oranizations( as in camnpaign info published in many states and open to the widest possible variance....sound utopian?

But first we must wait for the juggarnaut to fall. Happy watching, everyone.

The Washington Post's major account of CIA Director Michael Hayden's recent briefing included a passage to the effect that according to Hayden, the information obtained by waterboarding KSM, Zubaida, and Nashiri constituted one quarter of all the "humint" (human intelligence) that the US government intelligence agencies have obtained about al Quaeda from 2002-2006.

Feeling safer yet?

Bill from Saginaw

I realized we were done for as a society when we started arguing the pro's & con's of torturing human beings.