Obama Exposes, Protects, and affirms Torture as a Tool of State

Today the Obama Administration released four DOJ Office of Legal Consul memos "permitting" the CIA and Pentagon to torture.

These memos permit governmental torture. What is implicit in these memos is giving the President the unilateraly authority to break domestic and international law.

The release of these memos added virtually nothing new to our knowledge of the torture crimes of the Bush Administration, except a greater degree of detail. All of the tortures listed have been extensively reported on from both inside sources and the victims.

These details are chilling in a new respect, far beyond the basic repugnance decent people have to torture.

These memos are chilling because they are a step by step, rather a blow by blow attempt by the highest legal professionals in our government, citizens who are sworn to uphold and protect our Constitution and Laws, to evade domestic and international laws against torture.

Even more disturbingly, they completely fail the smell test. As hard as they try to put cruelty and torture into a framework of legal justification, to say that torture is not torture, they fail. Their failures are centered in a fundamental misuse of both words and meaning.

All of the memo's findings are based on redefining words out of context and meaning. Severe pain has become "discomfort." If these memos were papers I was grading, they would all get D's.

These memos confirm that the stark realities of systamtic kidnapping, illegal transportation, secret detention, and torture originated in the .

Submitted by alexwierbinski on Fri, 04/17/2009 - 05:59.