WaPo: So Torture Is Legal? (Applebaum)

[BlueEyedSon]

So Torture Is Legal?

By Anne Applebaum
Wednesday, June 16, 2004; Page A27

To understand the magnitude of what may have gone on in America's secret prisons, you don't need special security clearance or inside information. Anyone who wants to connect the dots can do it. To see what I mean, review the content of a few items now easily found on the Internet.

.....

As I say, connect the dots: They lead from the White House to the Pentagon to Abu Ghraib, and from Abu Ghraib back to military intelligence and thus to the Pentagon and the White House. They don't, it is true, make a complete picture. They don't actually reveal whether direct White House and Pentagon orders set off a chain of events leading to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, prisoner deaths in Afghanistan or other uses of torture we haven't learned about yet.

But who will fill in the blanks? Here is the tragedy: Despite the easy availability of evidence, almost nobody has an interest in pushing the investigation as far as it should go.

Clearly the administration will not ever, of its own volition, tell us what the White House knew and when the White House knew it: There's an election coming up. As if to underline this point, the president ducked and dodged last week when asked at a news conference about torture, declaring that "the instructions went out to our people to adhere to the law." But which law? The Geneva Conventions? Or the law as defined by secret memos?

More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44874-2004Jun15.html

[CharlesGroce]

1. Well I want the investigation to go as far as it should Mr. Applebaum...

And I'm betting half of the American people do too, it's just that you and your colleagues aren't reporting the news, thereby giving the American people no choice in the matter.

Maybe the American people need a new press, one that doesn't lie all of the time; one that has only the agenda of impartially informing the citizenry. You can still keep your job though, Applebaum, so we can laugh at you.

[MountainLaurel]

2. Ms. Applebaum

And is it a matter of the mainstream press not reporting these activities as fully as they should, or just that large percentages of the American people not read the newspaper or watch CBS News? Or does the bulk of the American public not care what happens to brown-skinned heathens on the other side of the world?