Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.-NY Times columnist Paul Krugman commenting on Jonathan Landay's report that the Bush administration was ordering torture against terrorist suspects - well before their Justice Department gave them the illegal green light - in order to create a link between 9/11 and Sadaam Hussein.
There’s a word for this: it’s evil.
I was one of the few who refused to drink the Bush-Cheney Kool Aid during the run-up to the Iraq War. It was a lonely place, let me tell ya...friends and family, from my side of the political spectrum, refusing to get past their fear and inertia of another 9/11, believing the Bush claims of a link between Iraq and al-Qaida despite an extreme lack of evidence to the contrary.
Here were are, six years later, my assessment of the situation spot on: there was no link, there were no WMD, the Bush team proved incompetent in their management of the war. (Imagine for a minute what would have happened had it been Jimmy Carter running this war that way...Congress would have demanded his head...and gotten it!)
I blathered on and on...for YEARS...that Bush and Cheney should have been impeached over the ginning up of intelligence in order to fight a war of choice in Iraq. But I never would have guessed that they were using torture to obtain false testimony from detainees in an effort to justify their fantasy.
And yet, while I never would have guessed it, the fact that it happened doesn't surprise me all that much. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzles...they're all war criminals. It's that plain and that simple.
Their Republican enablers in Congress didn't have the cajones to impeach; in 2004 the American public was still spooked just enough to return the Bush administration to the White House for another four years; and despite a rather swift case of buyer's remorse, the public never really clamored for impeachment during the second term. But it's not too late to punish these evil men. They should be arrested straight away, placed in cinder block jail cells in the Hague, charged with war crimes by the International War Crimes Tribunal, and sentenced to the fullest extent of international law.
That is the only way the United States will cleanse itself of this horrible stain, and the only way to prevent a future power hungry president from doing it all again.
The. Only. Way.
