Myth and Reality About Torture

by Scott Horton
The Daily Beast
April 27, 2009

Scott Horton, who has led coverage of Bush era wrongdoings, busts three pervasive myths—and says a torture memo writer ignored a warning about the policy’s criminal risks. Among his findings:

• A torture memo writer refused to comply with a warning about criminal risks—and exposes the truth about the policies.
• Rove and Cheney are convinced that Bush-era torture policy is a promising political product for a party down on its luck.
• Rumsfeld gave step-by-step directions for techniques used at Abu Ghraib.
• Torture techniques originated from the White House shortly after 9/11—long before they were arguably needed on the battlefield.
• Torture was used by Cheney and Rumsfeld to find justification for the invasion of Iraq.
• Jay Bybee was confirmed to a lifetime appointment as all eyes were on Colin Powell’s speech to the UN about Iraq’s WMD program.

In the space of a week, the torture debate in America has been suddenly transformed. The Bush administration left office resting its case on the claim it did not torture. The gruesome photographs from Abu Ghraib, it had said, were the product of “a few bad apples” and not of government policy. But the release of a series of grim documents has laid waste to this defense. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s report—adopted with the support of leading Republicans senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham—has demonstrated step by step how abuses on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan had their genesis in policy choices made at the pinnacle of the Bush administration. A set of four Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memoranda from the Bush era has provided a stomach-turning legal justification of the application of specific torture techniques, including waterboarding.

(More here.)