Bush loyalists still touting, getting away with torture

Water torture table used by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Tuol Sleng Museum. CC photo: waterboardingdotorg

via CAAI News Media

Although the practice is roundly rejected by the international community and was banned by President Barack Obama the day he took office, some just won’t stop defending torture.

Marc Thiessen, speech writer to former president George W. Bush and author of “Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe & How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack,” was invited on CNN to debate torture with Philippe Sands, a University College London professor and barrister who regularly litigates cases before international courts.

Thiessen said policies allowing torture, including water boarding, were “… the most successful and important intelligence programs in the history of the CIA.”

Thiessen is among a group of radicalized ideologues, including a Supreme Court justice, who have defended or are actively campaigning to revive the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. The Bush administration unsuccessfully sought -- through semantic tricks -- to legitimize torture, even though it was specifically outlawed by the UN Convention Against Torture, as well as the U.S. Constitution which, by the way, borrowed the exact words that forbid “cruel and unusual punishment” from the 1300-year-old English Bill of Rights.

Law-schmaw, say the torture radicals. During his interview, Thiessen criticized reporter Christiane Amanpour for comparing U.S. waterboarding with Khmer Rouge water torture. “You’re one of the people who have spread these mistruths,” he said.

Amanpour responded: “That’s called spreading the truth.”

So why is this debate still going on?

No one from the Bush administration has thus far been held accountable for torturing people. In fact, just last week the Dept. of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility cleared Bush administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, authors of the “torture memos,” of professional misconduct allegations, according to Newsweek.

View Amanpour’s segment “Debating torture.”