Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Brad reports on a Sy Hersh speech at U.Chicago in Torture and Rumors of Torture.

We're heavy into hearsay territory here, but if this is really true, we haven't hit bottom yet:

Bush, he said, was closing ranks, purging anyone who wasn't 100% with him. Said Tenet has a child in bad health, has heart problems, and seemed to find him generally a decent guy under unimaginable pressure, and that people told him that Tenet feared a heart attack if he had to take one more grilling from Cheney. “When these guys memoirs come out, it will shock all of us.”…

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, “You haven't begun to see evil…” then trailed off. He said, “horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.”

He looked frightened.

At some point, we run out of new horrors, don't we? Please?

(And at some point, Real Soon Now, mass revulsion takes over, right?)

Digby points out GW Bush's non-denial denial when faced with a softball torture question:

Q: Mr. President, I wanted to return to the question of torture. What we've learned from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that U.S. officials can torture detainees without running afoul of the law.

So when you say that you want the U.S. to adhere to international and U.S. laws, that's not very comforting. This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?

BUSH: Look, I'm going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you.

We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws. And that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions from me to the government.

What does it mean when the head of government cannot simply say “Torture is wrong and I would never condone it”? Might it mean that he read a memo or two that suggested the key to making torture legal was giving the torturers reasonable grounds to bleieve that their actions are legal … because the President authorized them?