Monday, October 19, 2009

You knew this was coming . . .

Anyone who imagined that the controversy over the CIA's torture policy was actually about "waterboarding" is either very innocent or very young. I long suspected that there was actually more horrifying instances of torture lurking behind the stonewalling around waterboarding, and now some of that information has begun to leak out. For instance, on Friday the British High Court rejected US and British efforts to suppress details of the CIA torture (in Pakistan) of British citizen Binyam Mohamed. For years the Bush, and now Obama, administrations have been trying to suppress the facts about what happened to Mohamed (who also spent time in Guantanamo).

Here's why, from Glenn Greenwald:

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, "is very far down the list of things they did," the official said.

And no, the laundry list of who's involved in this is not pretty. It seems Hillary Clinton herself at one point intervened to suppress the details of Bush-era torture. And the Obama administration is currently attempting to block Mohamed's bid to seek restitution in the US court system as well. Yes, we can, indeed.

And I have to ask any conservatives out there, or other apologists for the Bush-Cheney torture regime: if this sort of thing happened to American soldiers, what exactly do you think a certain portion of the American public would be crying out for?

Death and destruction rained down on the nations of the perpetrators?

Exactly.

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