The word "crisis" is frequently being used these days to describe the state of our nation. Usually this is used to refer to our economic situation, but there is another crisis that is quietly shaking the modern American power structure as we know it.
Many facts of the torture that has occurred in the past seven years have come to the surface thanks to investigative journalists like New Yorker writer Jane Mayer, who published the definitive book on the subject, "The Dark Side."
Facts have also come to light as a result of the recently released bipartisan report from the Senate Armed Services Committee headed by Carl Levin and John McCain.
Politicians and the media elite are currently arguing about the best way to deal with these quite grim revelations. Some are arguing that the perpetrators need to be brought to justice, while others argue that we "need to look to the future instead of to the past."
A handful of reporters, however, are still trying to sell the old hook-and-bait about how torture got out of control due to a few at the bottom ranks, which is where the responsibility lies.
In a Newsweek cover story from Jan. 10 titled "Obama's Cheney Dilemma," Stu Taylor and Evan Thomas write, "It's likely that the take-the-gloves-off attitude of Cheney and his allies filtered down through the ranks, until untrained prison guards with sadistic tendencies were making sport with electric shock. But no direct link has been reported."
This is simply not the case. Many of the techniques that caused the U.S. so much shame during the Abu Ghraib scandal - use of dogs, phobias, mock executions, stress positions, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, beatings - were all signed off by the president.
The Senate report states, "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."
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