One promise I would not mind Obama breaking

[tangaroa]

Obama has suggested that he would not be opposed to Attorney General Eric Holder taking legal action against Bush Administration individuals involved in the torturing of prisoners. This comes about a day or two after he and Attorney General Eric Holder both announced they would not consider prosecuting anyone for torture. I would not mind Obama and Holder going back on their words in this situation. It is shocking that there was enough political pressure on them for them to make such a promise in the first place.

An excellent piece of journalism by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti in the New York Times tracks the origin of the torture program through the people who approved of it. Bush, Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Senators Bob Graham [D-FL] and Richard Shelby [R-AL] Representatives Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] and Porter Goss [R-FL] were all briefed on the torture program and all approved of it. National Security Council Director Condoleezza Rice at least had qualms about torture, but approved it when experts assured her it was legal. The named promoters of torture were Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, Air Force psychologists James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessin, CIA Director George Tenet, and CIA Deputy Director John E. McLaughlin.

Torture's approvers suppose that it works. We now know that the waterboard was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times. Obviously, torture did not work the first time nor the second time nor the third or the fourth or so on, going all the way up to the one-hundred-eighty-third time, or else they would not have needed to torture him 183 times. And that was just in one month.

See also:

• a 2007 report by Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair magazine which reported many of the same things as are in the Shane/Mazetti article, going into further detail on some of them. Eban's article also describes how the CIA's torture of Abu Zubaida ended his usefulness as an intelligence source after he had already been turned by the FBI and had been surrendering good intelligence.
• The Senate Intelligence Committee is reviewing the Bush Administration's torture policy. The Committee expects to finish its investigation in "six to eight months".
• Some of the Bush Administration's torture techniques and justifications were also used by Nazi Germany. Nazis who conducted enhanced interrogations were shot as war criminals.