Here is more incontrovertible evidence to add to the mountain that the US government has engaged in illegal, illicit, amoral, shocking, and utterly reprehensible conduct.

Over at Glenn's site, a string of trolls quickly popped up to jeer and scorn at the lily-livered, bleeding-heart idea that any of this horseplay was torture in the first place, or that there's the slightest question that all's fair in love and the Global War on Terror.

A government that asserts power and authority outside the rule of law ceases to be a civilized government. The barbarian government induces a commensurate coarseness and thuggishness in the citizenry.

The agitated, confused, and hysterical yahoos showing up to disrupt town hall meetings, such as they are, are one manifestation of the rise of the reactionary proletariat.

If the present maladministration persists in shrinking from the reality reflected in these reports, and shirking its admittedly painful duty to bring government wrongdoing to justice, it will remain a partner with pro-torture brutes in a three-legged race to the bottom.

· Yr Obd't Servant

Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth had a better chance to remove her blemish
than the CIA has of ever washing away this stigmata.

The CIA comes across as a gang of hapless amateurs, waving electric drills and threatening people's mothers. For the sake of national security, let's get someone on the job who knows how to do it.

'Every American should have to read the excerpts in order to know what was done in their name'

With the exception of the '12 decent Americans' I speak of often; the rest of them care little what is done in their name. Otherwise they would have spoken up long ago, and changed their 'very nasty habit' of repeating their history; especially the negative, which seems to be their 'national passion'.

From the beginning America has had the chance that no other nation in history has had to be a shinning example of truth and justice and liberty. Instead they have been the exact opposite.

"If the USA were another nation, the USA would invade the USA in order to keep the world safe; and they would be justified."

Good Luck America, you really need it.

Stupid is what stupid tolerates.

Torture IS a US American Value: Pres. Hoover's 1931-32 Wickersham Commission on Official Lawlessness reported that "third degree" methods inflicting mental & physical suffering were widespread by police & guards throughout the US, including physical brutality, threats, sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme cold or heat--also known as "the sweat box''--& blinding with powerful lights & other forms of sensory overload or deprivation.

In 1981 as a MA legis aide, I found torture at its Walpole prison: "a pattern of systematic torture incl withholding water, heat, bedding, medical care, & showers; imposition of hazards such as flooding cells, placing foreign matter in food, igniting clothes & bedding, spraying with mace & tear gas; regular phys assaults & beatings, forcing prisoners to lie naked on freezing ground while beaten...
(Walpole State Prison: An Exercise in Torture, Source: www.brianwillson.com)

This was more than two decades before the revelations of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo

I can't imagine what is behind the redacted part. The part that is visible is atrocious. Bring the troops home. An uncivilized democracy is not worth fighting for. Bush rallied up support for the Iraq war, by citing Saddam Hussein's atrocities, while we were killing 3,000 to 4,000 Iraqi children every month with economic sanctions and bombings. Where are the Church leaders who convinced Americans that the Bush- Cheney conservative party was the political party of moral values?