Will there ever be an end to the excuses for Bush torture policies?
Now they're saying they didn't know it was wrong because the techniques had been used by Americans during military training:
The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?
Apparently they sat around at high-level meetings in 2002 - cabinet members, lawmakers, CIA officials - and came to a consensus that overturned international law and centuries of historical standards of practice because they just didn't know any better!
This extraordinary consensus was possible...largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.
I see NOTHING! I know NOTHING!
Of course if they'd known the SERE techniques were reverse-engineered from torture methods used by the Communists in the Korean War to extract false confessions for show trials they never would have used them!
Tenet's CIA researched the proposal for torture thoroughly, but somehow managed to miss every significant feature of its history and lack of effectiveness!
The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.
They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.
The process was "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm," a former C.I.A. official said.
The whole sordid tale is going to come out, whether through investigation by a special prosecutor or through a truth commission. Or at least drip by drip from former officials anonymously leaking to the press as they desperately try to point the finger of blame at everyone else before it gets pointed at them.
As we descend from tragedy into farce.