New York Times editorial: On Torture and American Values

Late last week, news broke that the Justice Department, under the Bush administration, had authorized the use of torture even earlier than we thought. The White House, of course, denies any wrongdoing. They're once again playing word games to try to justify the use of torture -- er, I mean "enhanced interrogation techniques".

I'm sorry to have taken so long to address this important development. So much is happening so quickly these days, and I can't seem to write fast enough.

But, fortunately, I don't always need to. The New York Times has already said what needs to be said, in an editorial in today's widely read Sunday edition.

An excerpt:
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Once upon a time, it was the United States that urged all nations to obey the letter and the spirit of international treaties and protect human rights and liberties. American leaders denounced secret prisons where people were held without charges, tortured and killed. And the people in much of the world, if not their governments, respected the United States for its values.

The Bush administration has dishonored that history and squandered that respect. As an article on this newspaper’s front page last week laid out in disturbing detail, President Bush and his aides have not only condoned torture and abuse at secret prisons, but they have conducted a systematic campaign to mislead Congress, the American people and the world about those policies.

After the attacks of 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the creation of extralegal detention camps where Central Intelligence Agency operatives were told to extract information from prisoners who were captured and held in secret. Some of their methods -- simulated drownings, extreme ranges of heat and cold, prolonged stress positions and isolation -- had been classified as torture for decades by civilized nations. The administration clearly knew this; the C.I.A. modeled its techniques on the dungeons of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union.

The White House could never acknowledge that. So its lawyers concocted documents that redefined "torture" to neatly exclude the things American jailers were doing and hid the papers from Congress and the American people. Under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Mr. Bush’s loyal enabler, the Justice Department even declared that those acts did not violate the lower standard of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

That allowed the White House to claim that it did not condone torture, and to stampede Congress into passing laws that shielded the interrogators who abused prisoners, and the men who ordered them to do it, from any kind of legal accountability.

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Read the full editorial.

This is not how I want my tax dollars to be spent.