“WE DO NOT TORTURE TERROR SUSPECTS.” — President George Walker Bush (November 7, 2005)

With a mighty crack and roar, the torture dam finally has broken.

After being little more than background noise for years, the grotesqueries of the Bush torture regime have gone prime time as the discussion suddenly has morphed from whether government officials in high places could really have made these things happen to whether they should be held accountable for them.

Washington and the U.S. have entered uncharted territory. There is no precedent in American history for what occurred and what could happen next. There also is a growing feeling of anger, bewilderment and panic in the capital that will not be wished away by a public ambivalent about the whole question of torture and a White House that has suddenly been forced to reverse field and deal with what is no longer a mere distraction amidst manifold other crises but the real possibility that a not small number of big names should be in the dock.

This is not about partisan reprisal, although defenders of the torture regime are trying to frame the debate as such amid myriad justifications.

As report after report and revelation after revelation comes rushing through the breach in the dam, it is obvious that there has been an unprecedented breach of the rule of law, international covenants and human decency that involved many of the top officials in the White House, Pentagon, CIA and Justice Department. (And yes, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as well.) Oval Office blow jobs certainly seem quaint by comparison.

Make no mistake about it, the torture regime was but a part of a larger mosaic in which politics supplanted policy in an administration that cared only about the desired result, not what price might have to be paid to attain it, as the president played to the Christianist hustings by asserting that he channeled the wisdom of the most famous torture victim in history.

So ferocious were the efforts to get the desired result that, as a forthcoming report from Justice’s Department of Professional Responsibility will show, when some officials spoke out strongly against the torture regime these unsung heroes were dismissed out of hand, and in some cases dismissed.

Did the Bushes, Cheneys and Rumsfeld really believe that the dam would hold? Consumed as they were by the smell of their own holes, they most certainly did.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index with links to other torture-related posts.