Tag: Waterboarding

It's no longer a secret: The CIA tortured suspects in the War on Terror. We know this, in part, because John Kiriakou, who worked in...

A report by Physicians for Human Rights released on Monday claims that U.S. physicians and psychologists betrayed ethical standards by collecting data on detainees’...

The New York Times and Sunday morning political talk shows are contorting themselves into linguistically-torturous positions in a feeble attempt to avoid using the word "torture" to describe the immoral and criminal techniques employed at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and CIA black sites against suspected al Qaeda-linked prisoners. Now, Foreign Policy magazine has produced the euphemism-free "ultimate guide to the Bush Administration's journey to the dark side."

The Web is brimming today with comment on Obama's release of the Bush team's torture memos, much of it decrying Obama's accompanying statement, in which he said he believes the torturers should not be held to account. But the politics that gave rise to the memos suggest a more accurate reading of the politics surrounding their release.

Noting that George Bush Sr. pardoned the Iran-Contra clan on Christmas eve of 1992, Democrats.com is warning that his son could do something very similar Wednesday: pardon Dick Cheney and the rest of the administration officials who authorized and encouraged the torture and humiliation of “war on terror” detainees.

As U.S. Attorney General-designate Michael Mukasey plays dumb on what constitutes torture, the lessons of Lewis Welshofer Jr. grow fuzzier. By now most Americans probably...