Torture. by any other name, smells.

Dan Froomkin:

By failing to return to the story again and again -- with palpable outrage -- I think the media actually normalized torture. We had an obligation to shout this story from the rooftops, day and night. But instead we lulled the public into complacency.

Secondly, while it's certainly worth exploring why any number of people were either actively or passively complicit in our torture regime -- and I'm all for some national self-flagellation here -- that has nothing to do with whether senior administration officials willfully broke the law, and whether they should be held accountable. It doesn't change the law.

Amato's Quote of the Day:

Dan Froomkin writes an impressive piece that exposes the torturers and their media enablers who covered up and participated in the torture policy of the Bush White House that is a must-read. It's called: "Complicity -- and Accountability -- on Torture," and he ends it on this note:

"The more the right wing tries to justify the torture policy, the worse they look. Using national security to justify torture is just a bald-faced attempt to hide the truth. What really went on was simple. The Bush administration felt that Al-Qaida could not be defeated while still preserving what America stands for."

Sully: The Lies Of Presidents

It occurs to me that the two most famous statements of the last two presidents will be "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," and "We do not torture." And both were lies in plain English, were understood to be lies by the two men involved, and yet both were subject to mental and legal asterisks that could give both men some kind of formal, if absurd, deniability.

For one statement, we impeached. For another, we kept on walking.

Sometimes history is not tragedy repeated as farce; it's farce repeated as tragedy.

Benen: BOLTON NEVER EXPECTED THE SPANISH INQUISITION...

Spanish Magistrate Baltasar Garzon continues to look into possible charges against the "Bush Six" -- Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, William J. Haynes II, David Addington, and Doug Feith -- for their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantanamo Bay.

John Bolton, Bush's former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and one of the nation's least credible but most recognized neocons, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post urging President Obama to intervene to protect the former Bush administration officials.

That wouldn't be especially noteworthy, were it not for Bolton's choice of words. (thanks to reader M.J. for the tip)

Behind-the-scenes diplomacy is often the best, and sometimes the only, way to accomplish important policy objectives, and one hopes that such efforts [from Obama administration officials] are underway. But in this case, firm and public statements are necessary to stop the pending Spanish inquisition and to dissuade others from proceeding.

Does Bolton really want to throw around, "Spanish inquisition" in this context? It seems pretty ironic since the actual Spanish Inquisition was when waterboarding was put to extensive use -- the very torture technique that's proven to be so problematic for the Bush Six.

Bolton added, "I believe strongly that criminalizing policy disagreements is both inappropriate and destructive." But as should be obvious by now, we're not talking about criminalizing "policy disagreements"; we're talking about criminalizing crime.

The real Spanish Inquisition in the 16th century and the Bush administration in the 21st century embraced the same torture technique. This problem goes well beyond a "policy disagreement."

Sully: "Inhuman"

It's odd, isn't it, that we use this word to describe abuse and torture of prisoners. The reason it's odd is that I'm not sure any animals torture. Yes, they can kill and maim and inflict dreadful suffering in the process of killing, eating or fighting. But the act of intentionally exploiting suffering, of lingering over some other being's pain - using it as a means to an end - is not an animal instinct, unless I'm mistaken.

And so torture is in fact extremely human; it represents in many ways humankind's unique capacity for cruelty.

It is the relationship between torturer and tortured that evokes the term "inhuman". Because it robs the victim of human dignity - and removes the torturer from the civil community of humankind. So this very human act of inhumanity is why torture, like rape, has, until recently, been so anathematized in the civilized West. This dehumanization can take many forms, and it isn't only in the act of torture. It is also implicit in the conditions and circumstances of the abuse. To take a simple example, Bush and Cheney authorized the stripping of prisoners of their clothes in order to break them down psychologically. Not many of us have been stripped like that, en masse, or separately, herded like animals from one cage to another, mocked, beaten, sexually abused and made more vulnerable, as naked humans are, to the extremes of heat and cold. You can't, after all, strip an animal of clothes and thereby deny it of dignity or add to its suffering. Shelter, maybe, of domesticated animals, but not clothes, that inherently human artefact.

For good measure, Bush and Cheney also robbed these suspects - I repeat suspects - of light by hooding or imprisoning them in windowless cells from which many were told they would never escape. They deprived them of sound - which is what bombarding human beings with insanely loud noise constantly does. When there's nothing but noise, there's no sound. They shackled them in positions that were both excruciating in pain but also means to deny them the simplest acts of basic autonomy, like wiping their asses when they shit. This was about destroying people at their core - over a period of time, as a means to "break" them as humans. Have you ever been shackled naked in such a fashion that you have to piss and shit on yourself repeatedly without being able to clean? Can you imagine how that feels?

Mr. Padilla was often put in stress positions for hours at a time. He would be shackled and manacled, with a belly chain, for hours in his cell. Noxious fumes would be introduced to his room causing his eyes and nose to run. The temperature of his cell would be manipulated, making his cell extremely cold for long stretches of time. Mr. Padilla was denied even the smallest, and most personal shreds of human dignity by being deprived of showering for weeks at a time, yet having to endure forced grooming at the whim of his captors...

No animal does this to other animals. Only humans do this to humans (and, of course, animals). Until you are turned into this:

"During questioning, [Padilla] often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body," Mr. Patel said. "The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel."

That's why I find the focus on waterboarding to be off-base. Yes, it is torture, even if the New York Times cannot bring itself to say so. It is also a form of rape - using drowning rather than sexual penetration as the chosen form of mastery. But the focus on a legal specificity - we can count the number of times these victims were near-drowned and suffocated! - misses, I think, the real abuse. Here is what one FBI agent said he saw at Guantanamo (and God knows what went on there after the FBI walked out of the program):

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. . . . On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor."

If you believe that America cannot survive without doing this to human beings, then what exactly is the America you believe in?