Torture Nation

The Bush Administration made an unsuccessful attempt to get the so-called "Nuremberg Defense" ("I vas chust followink orders, mein herr") written into international law.

No word as to whether or not Dick Cheney planned to visit either the Yakusuni Shrine or the graves of all of the Germans who were executed for "following orders." The Nuremberg Defense has been a loser for over 500 years and was specifically made illegal in the 1940s and people were hung for using it to justify their war crimes, but that didn't stop Torturer Dick and his confederates from trying to change all that.

It is amazing that the very same people who were so outraged by Bill Clinton getting a hummer on the job and lying about it ("zomg, he dishonored the presidency!!1!") are so willing to overlook the dishonoring of our nation by both the Bush Administration's use of torture and those same officials' arrogant defense, to this day, of the use of torture.

It is also interesting to note that the defense of torture by Ricky the Torturer never touches on the blowback from the use of torture. They never mention how the American use of torture has been a recruiting boon for al Qaeda and its allies:

Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

Or you can read the testimony of a retired FBI agent who was involved in the FBI's questioning of terror suspects:

Based on my experience in talking to al Qaeda members, I am persuaded that revenge, in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland, is coming, that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill American and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in the forestalling this calamitous eventuality.

Torture degrades our image abroad and complicates our working relationships with foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies. If I were the director of marketing for al Qaeda and intent on replenishing the ranks of jihadists. I know what my first piece of marketing collateral would be. It would be a blast e-mail with an attachment. The attachment would contain a picture of Private England (sp) pointing at the stacked, naked bodies of the detainees at Abu Ghraib. The picture screams out for revenge and the day of reckoning will come. The consequences of coercive intelligence gathering will not evaporate with time.

One could plausibly make the argument that the proponents of torture are engaged in knowingly aiding and abetting our enemies.