Bush’s Torture Policy Is a Cancer
By Brent Budowsky
Editor’s Note: Increasingly, U.S. government officials, including senior military officers, must go through verbal gymnastics to avoid implicating George W. Bush in an obvious crime: the authorization to torture al-Qaeda suspects.
In this guest essay, former congressional staffer Brent Budowsky warns that the rhetorical gyrations are now endangering U.S. troops:
In unprecedented congressional testimony, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann recently refused to say it would be illegal for American POWs to be tortured through waterboarding by our enemies.
He couldn’t because a policy claimed to be legal when committed by our government would be equally legal when committed by our enemies against our troops and POWs.
The legal perversion of Gen. Hartmann’s testimony would outrage American military families.
It dramatizes how alien this torture policy is from two centuries of American military and legal tradition, when an American general cannot defend the time honored rights of American POWs, and AmericaÕs enemies could use his testimony as their defense for torture against our troops.
From the days of George Washington, every president, every Congress and every Supreme Court has believed that torture is illegal and violates cardinal American values.
From the days of the Continental Army until today, torture has been opposed by virtually every commander of every branch of military service.
Of course, the CIA destroyed the torture tapes that were sought as evidence by the 9-11 Commission, courts and Congress.
They were destroyed because they were evidence of abuses that the weight of legal opinion would conclude constitutes criminal conduct under international and American law. Their destruction probably constitutes obstruction of justice.
Torture is a cancer that metastasizes to everything it touches. [more]