Justice in America: Blind or Just Look the Other Way

Frame and Story from Here

A few highlights and walk down memory lane:

The long road to this story asking the question along the way is: Does torture work?

•   Gen. David Petraeus: “Torture yields information of questionable value.”

•   The FBI warns military interrogators: “Enhanced techniques are of questionable effectiveness.”
•   Special Ops Interrogator: “Enhanced interrogation causes detainees to shut up.”
•   Military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency [JPRA] cautioned: “Enhanced program produces unreliable intelligence.”
•   Army psychologist: “Enhanced techniques ‘do not work’ in intelligence-gathering.”
•   Another Army psychologist: “Rapport techniques produce better intelligence.”
•   FBI Director Robert Meuller: “Enhanced techniques haven’t prevented any terrorist attacks.”
•   FBI’s Jack Cloonan: “Abu Zubaydah and KSM gave only pabulum.”
•   CIA Official: “CIA interrogations of KSM produced total f-ing BS.”
•   FBI Interrogator who broke Abu Zubaydah and revealed the name and whereabouts of KSM, Mr. Ali Soufan: “Torturing Abu Zubaydah was unnecessary. The CIA enhanced interrogations applied later destroyed the progress that had been made with Zubaydah. Traditional methods provided important actionable intelligence, like the name and location which led to the capture of KSM.”

We know the CIA tapes showing torture were destroyed. Funny, destroying evidence of a crime (and yes, torture is a crime and has been for decades), used to be a crime, too.

This apparent final chapter reads this way:

The Obama administration's aggressive, full-scale whitewashing of the "war on terror" crimes committed by Bush officials is now complete. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the closing without charges of the only two cases under investigation relating to the US torture program: one that resulted in the 2002 death of an Afghan detainee at a secret CIA prison near Kabul, and the other the 2003 death of an Iraqi citizen while in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib. This decision, says the New York Times, "eliminates the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the CIA."

And, just think, the US has the gall to say we are the moral compass for the free world. I think the compass needle is broken and only points where the holder wants it to point.