How much worse can it get? Seymour Hersh, who broke the torture scandal in the first place, has this to say(via
Brad DeLong):
“He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, “You haven’t begun to see evil…” then trailed off. He said, “horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.”
He looked frightened.
Can it get worse? Can it get better? Well, it seems that one of the torturers is planning to call Rumsfeld, Cambone, Wolfowitz, Lt.Gen. Sanchez, and the White House general counsel. I wonder if that last one explains why Bush needs lawyers of his own? After all, when your official legal advisers sign something like
this saying that (in effect) it is quite all right to inflict “physical pain equivalent to major organ failure” so long as the President says so (“We find that in the circumstances of the current war against al-Qai’da and its allies, prosecution under section 2340A may be barred because enforcement of the statute would represent unconstitutional infringement of the President’s authority to conduct war”) you might find it wouldn’t help your own defence, no? And won’t it be ironic if – if I read the footnotes to that correctly – one of the key statutes under which torturers might be prosecuted is the Patriot Act!