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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