The Eagerness of Bush Administration Torture Warriors

The Bush administration took a hard hit on torture today. In a report from the Physicians for Human Rights, former Major General Antonio Taguba is quoted as claiming that the Bush administration engaged in war crimes:

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Unfortunately, there is also the question of whether the obviousness of the Bush administration's war crimes will become as clear to the American public as it is to Gen. Taguba.

Today's McClatchey article contained another interesting statement from a general involved in the Bush administration's human rights situation.

Also this week, a probe by the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed how senior Pentagon officials pushed for harsher interrogation methods over the objections of top military lawyers. Those methods later surfaced in Afghanistan
and Iraq . . . .

There was no "bright line of abuse which could not be transgressed," former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora told the Senate committee.

In fact, the Bush administration was quite eager to cross those lines. Contemptuous of international law and equally contemptuous of the American legal system, the Bush administration was eager to establish its own version of lynch law for the War on Terror.