War Handwavium

Short version: yes, we did.

Longer version:

What we did included the deaths of at least a hundred prisoners, fake executions, threats to kill the family of prisoners, threats to rape the family of prisoners, buttstroking with rifles and knee kicks, dislocated shoulders, induced hypothermia, pressure points on carotid artery,

And waterboarding. That thing we convicted Japanese WW2 war criminals for doing.

Of the approximately one-thousand prisoners who went through Guantanamo, the US government has admitted that the vast majority of them were innocent. About 800 were eventually released without any charges, let alone a trial, or due process of any kind.

Attorney General Eric Holder has announced the most cowardly approach to investigating the obvious war crimes: a “preliminary review” that accepts the guidance from Bush’s DOJ as legal and Holder, that great example of courage that he is, is only going to investigate whether anyone exceeded that illegal guidance. Bush’s DOJ memos advocated torture that violates the Geneva Convention on multiple levels. But Holder doesn’t want to investigate that at all. Instead, Holder wants to use an Abu Ghraib model of investigation which will pursue only the low-level people in the trenches and ignore the obvious evidence that goes all the way up the chain of command directly to the President of the United States.

Cowards all.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/08/24/ig_report/index.html

http://luxmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o10/clients/aclu/IG_Report.pdf

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/08/25/king/index.html