| For one thing, the SP will only be looking at the CIA side of the torture and War Crimes that Bush has admitted authorizing, there is till the Levin report to deal with...the Rumsfeld War Crimes contained in the Senate Armed Services Committee Report (pdf).
As Sen. Levin said in commenting on the report...
In my judgment, the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration's interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse - such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan - to low ranking soldiers. Claims, such as that made by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorized acts of a "few bad apples," were simply false.
The truth is that, early on, it was senior civilian leaders who set the tone. On September 16, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney suggested that the United States turn to the "dark side" in our response to 9/11. Not long after that, after White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales called parts of the Geneva Conventions "quaint," President Bush determined that provisions of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to certain detainees. Other senior officials followed the President and Vice President's lead, authorizing policies that included harsh and abusive interrogation techniques.
The record established by the Committee's investigation shows that senior officials sought out information on, were aware of training in, and authorized the use of abusive interrogation techniques. Those senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses. As the Committee report concluded, authorizations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.
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The release of the CIA's own report, written by the CIA Inspector General, from the CIA perspective and with the well being of the CIA in mind...contains new horrors that would shock any nation not already jaded from the pictures and reports of abuse that we have been allowed to know about. And by all reports....the WORST parts are part of the 50% of the report still redacted.
Let's think about the report for a minute.
In the report we are told that detainees were beaten to death, were threatened with death, (one of the most serious breaches of the Convention Against Torture) were made to think the person in the adjoining cell HAD been killed. Detainees were told that their children would be tortured, that their children would be killed....that their mother would be raped in front of them....
The report confirms and documents ALL of the psychological abuse, medieval torture techniques, used in addition to waterboarding and beating people to death...
And yet still the WORST parts, parts WORSE than all that, if you can imagine that possibility....are still redacted.
ALL of the evidence on public record point to the fact that this was in fact the secret but Official and Fully Authorized Policy of the Bush Administration.
The CIA hired contractors to develop the Torture Policy. They built Secret Torture prisons in an organized, planned and funded policy. They established what amounted to a torture airline to shuttle it's victims to secret torture prisons around the globe.
The military under Rumsfeld planned and developed and funded a program of torture techniques in Gitmo and then exported them first to Afghanistan ans then to Iraq, culminating in the horrors of Abu Ghraib.
Aside from the one confirmed case of a detainee being tortured to death, there are scores, and possibly hundreds of more cases of death by torture...
As Gen. Barry McCaffrey recently put it:
We should never, as a policy, maltreat people under our control, detainees. We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.
Journalist and Human Rights Watch researcher John Sifton similarly documented that "approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death."
Short of genocide, there is no greater crime possible than torturing people to death.
And this was done as part of a planned, organized, funded, and authorized policy of torture under George Bush.
In YOUR name.
Now that the slow and grinding wheels of criminal justice have started to roll....it is time for a public accounting of the War Crimes of George W. Bush, Dick Aheney, Donald Rumsfeld. And the Rubber Stamp Republican Congress, many of them still in office, who enabled, and are attempting to cover up, the Bush Torture Policy.
It is time for a Truth Commission on not just the War crimes of the Bush Era, but ALL of the crimes. Including the politicization of the Department of justice that allowed them to commit all of those crimes.
The American People and the world are entitled to the truth about torture.
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