Lest anyone be convinced (read: snowed) that Bush is actually saying the US doesn't torture detainees, be sure to read his legal parsing carefully:
Bush did not confirm or deny the existence of CIA secret prisons that The Washington Post disclosed last week, and would not address demands by the International Committee of the Red Cross to have access to the suspects reportedly held at them.This is the law as redefined by activist appointed officials such as Alberto Gonzalez and, of course, David Addington.
"We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice," Bush said at a news conference with Panamanian President Martin Torrijos. "We are gathering information about where the terrorists might be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans," he said.
"Anything we do to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law," Bush said. "We do not torture. And therefore we're working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible, more possible to do our job."
Addington is most notorious for his role in the creation of Bush's military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay and for giving his legal imprimatur to torturing terrorism suspects, two Bush decisions that have done immeasurable harm to the U.S. image abroad. The New York Times called Addington "one of the most important architects of the administration's legal strategy against foreign terrorism." [...]
This pattern of Cheney aides staking out extreme positions until they lead to a political crisis or judicial rebuke reached its zenith in the case of the infamous Justice Department memo arguing that torturing suspected terrorists "may be justified." According to The Washington Post, which first obtained the legal document, Addington was the most vigorous advocate of the so-called "commander-in-chief" section, which stated that any law barring torture "does not apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants." In a separate memo, which Addington wrote under Alberto Gonzales's name, he argued that Geneva Convention provisions were obsolete for terrorist suspects.
Posts
November 08, 2005 9:50 PM
The idea that King George the Turd and His Flying Weasel Circus consider themselves so far above the law as to openly advocate torture is breathtaking and unprecedented in American government. There has never been an administration as arrogant, as full of a sense of entitlement and as just purely evil as this one is. They are liars, thieves and scoundrels, traitors to the people and the Constitution, and it's entirely possible that we are now witnessing, as a direct result of their actions, the fall of the American empire.
Posted by Generik
November 08, 2005 10:00 PM
No kidding. The extent of the corruption, the mad dash for power, the greed, the callousness and disregard, the scope of this darkness.....
I still hold out hope that the American empire will give way to an America much more resistant to such fascistic tendencies. There's hope. Gotta be.
Posted by Mitch