Torturous

Much has been made of the so-called torture memos before and since their release earlier this week.

A lot was already known about their contents and the authors of the memos. A few particularly striking things have emerged over the past few days though. Chief among them reporting from McClatchy based on the memos and the new Levin Report that has uncovered the insistence of the Bush administration that Al-Qaida suspects who were not indicating a link to Iraq during interregations be tortured until they did reveal this (non-existant) link. Wow.

Also coming to light is the fact that not everyone in the Bush administration was eagerly pushing for torture, but when concerns were raised they were brushed aside and deleted. Philip Zelikow, at the time a senior aide to Secretary of State Condelezza Rice, wrote this week in Foreign Policy of his attempts to question the legality and usefulness of encouraging the use of torture in interrogations...

At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn't entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives.

Here he is being interviewed by Rachel Maddow:

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(via PA)

Suffice it to say very bad things were being done, and in our name as Americans. We need to get to the bootom of this and we need to hold people responsible for their actions.