LIES OF THE TORTURE REGIME

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) spoke in the Senate yesterday about this nations "Torture Regime" and the lies that are being told to protect the guilty. Here's a taste. The entire statement (it's not too long) in the Congressional Record is here.

President Bush told us ``America does not torture'' while authorizing
conduct that America itself has prosecuted as crime and war crime, as
torture.
 Vice President Cheney agreed in an interview that waterboarding was
like ``a dunk in the water'' when it was actually a technique of
torture from the Spanish Inquisition to Cambodia's killing fields.
 John Yoo, who wrote the original torture opinions, told Esquire
magazine that waterboarding was only done three times. Public reports
now indicate that just two detainees were waterboarded 83 times and 183
times. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed reportedly was waterboarded 183 times. A
former CIA official had told ABC News: ``KSM lasted the longest on the
waterboard--about a minute and a half--but once he broke, it never had
to be used again.''
 We were told that waterboarding was determined to be legal, but we
were not told how badly the law was ignored and manipulated by the
Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, nor were we told how
furiously government and military lawyers tried to reject the defective
OLC opinions.
 We were told we couldn't second guess the brave CIA officers who did
this unpleasant duty, and then we found out that the program was led by
private contractors with no real interrogation experience.

He goes on with more of the facts that fly in the face of what the members of the former administration, and their apologists, have been saying. I so hope that we can get all of the facts out and prosecute these war criminals!