Frank Rich - "We do not torture and other funny stories" Truthout

[texpatriot2004]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111305Z.shtml

'We Do Not Torture' and Other Funny Stories
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

Sunday 13 November 2005

If it weren't tragic it would be a New Yorker cartoon. The president of the United States, in the final stop of his forlorn Latin America tour last week, told the world, "We do not torture." Even as he spoke, the administration's flagrant embrace of torture was as hard to escape as publicity for Anderson Cooper.

The vice president, not satisfied that the C.I.A. had already been implicated in four detainee deaths, was busy lobbying Congress to give the agency a green light to commit torture in the future. Dana Priest of The Washington Post, having first uncovered secret C.I.A. prisons two years ago, was uncovering new "black sites" in Eastern Europe, where ghost detainees are subjected to unknown interrogation methods redolent of the region's Stalinist past. Before heading south, Mr. Bush had been doing his own bit for torture by threatening to cast the first veto of his presidency if Congress didn't scrap a spending bill amendment, written by John McCain and passed 90 to 9 by the Senate, banning the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners.

So when you watch the president stand there with a straight face and say, "We do not torture" - a full year and a half after the first photos from Abu Ghraib - you have to wonder how we arrived at this ludicrous moment. The answer is not complicated. When people in power get away with telling bigger and bigger lies, they naturally think they can keep getting away with it. And for a long time, Mr. Bush and his cronies did. Not anymore.

<snip>

[Skink]

1. Octonegariain Helen Thomas....

:wtf:

[prescole]

2. "We do not torture" sounds a bit like "There is no sexual relationship"

The too-clever use of the present tense (we do not torture RIGHT NOW...or, RIGHT NOW, either...or even, RIGHT NOW...maybe a little bit now, and now, and now...but NOT NOW...or NOW.)

[democrank]

3. Bravo!

Rumblings from a truth teller.

[Cha]

4. Yeah, this is on them..

" Not that it matters now. The facts the American people are listening to at this point come not from an administration that they no longer find credible, but from the far more reality-based theater of war. The Qaeda suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman on 11/9, like the terrorist attacks in Madrid and London before them, speak louder than anything else of the price we are paying for the lies that diverted us from the war against the suicide bombers of 9/11 to the war in Iraq."

Thanks for this article by Frank Rich in full from Truthout.

[Matilda]

5. Perhaps it's just a matter of degree.

They don't put people on the rack any more.