Yes, Waterboarding Was Done 3 Times, In Our Name

...and the SOB (as the C-I-C is known around here) signed off on it.

The CIA admits it.

When are we going to do something about it?



Gee, for a nation that doesn't torture, this shouldn't be happening:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The CIA director on Tuesday publicly named for the first time the three suspected al Qaeda detainees who were subjected to the harsh interrogation technique of waterboarding.

"It was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was used on Abu Zubayda, and it was used on [Abd al-Rahim] al-Nashiri," CIA Director Michael Hayden told a Senate hearing.
[...snip...]

Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, who also testified at the hearing, said waterboarding remains a technique in the CIA's arsenal, according to The Associated Press. He said it would require the president's consent and legal approval from the attorney general, the AP reported.

There you have it, folks.

Bush, in his speeches where he insisted "we do not torture," constantly referred to the Attorney General's tortured definition of torture that was rewritten to exclude waterboarding, so that he could claim that "we do not torture" and still not technically lie, even though he knew he had personally signed off on Waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" ("torture") techniques.

That's how he plans to get off the hook -- he'll claim he was following the legal definition.
Unfortunately for him, he and the DoJ knew that there were already existing cases (read: precedent) clearly establishing that the US Government viewed waterboarding as torture, so their shell game with word definitions doesn't protect him (or the DoJ) from war crimes and from federal criminal law prosecution.

Just because he's using a convenient re-definition of the word "torture" that doesn't mean that he's not actually torturing people; it just means he's even more guilty of trying to lie and cover it through -- quite literally -- a lie / sin of omission: their convenient new definition and what it leaves out of the list of things considered to be torture.

Now, of course, we have a stronger case for his willful signing off on the use of it. The case for "plausible deniability" is shot from the get-go; if you take the time to watch videos where Bush denied that our nation engaged in torture, and examine how he careful confabulates and incorporates the shiny-new DoJ definition as his working (read: "relevant") definition of "torture" it becomes very clear that he is explicitly attempting to establish that excuse.

He and his entire Administration should be immediately impeached, removed from office and prosecuted for War Crimes.

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The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.