Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Blackest of The Bush Administration’s Black Marks

You don’t have to suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome to believe that some seriously nasty things have happened in Washington over the last six-plus years. But when historians take stock of The Age of Bush it is likely that they will find there is no darker stain on that presidency — and on America at the start of the new millennium — than the top-down approval of the use of torture.

Almost as abhorrent is this secrecy-obsessed administration’s systematic efforts to justify the use of torture on the one hand while denying that it approved its use on the other.

That is the crux of a New York Times’ investigative report this week that found while the Justice Department publicly declared torture to be “abhorrent” in a 2004 legal opinion it then issued a secret opinion a few months later that endorsed the CIA’s use of head-slapping, waterboarding and being confined naked in frigid cells, among other hard-core techniques that the intelligence agency had cherrypicked from the cookbooks of Soviet and Saudi dungeon masters.

It is a testament to how far this administration has slipped from the moorings of common decency — let alone the belief of suckers like myself that the U.S. never would succumb to acting like terrorists in fighting back against terrorists — that the Times story actually made me feel dirty.

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