Warm Up the War Crimes Trials; Pt. 5

"We do not torture," George W. Bush, November 7, 2005.

Except when the CIA has asked if they can.

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

Except when we do.

The senior Pentagon official in the Bush administration's system for prosecuting detainees said in a published interview that she had concluded that interrogators had tortured a Guantánamo detainee who has sometimes been described as "the 20th hijacker" in the 2001 terrorist attacks.

And so, the Pentagon is shocked, shocked, when men who have been released from Guantanamo take up arms against us out of revenge (see the next post).