The US Has Been Torturing Prisoners

If you were like me, you were so surprised and revolted by the spectacle of human suffering and abuse in Abu-grahib, that you were ready to be conforted with the 'few bad apples' excuse.

Now it has become increasingly clear that the problem goes much more deeper than that. Torture was sanctioned by the Bush administration at the highest level. War Crimes have been committed the question now is how the criminals will be held accountable. The following article has been documenting these facts since 2004, but you would not know it unless you actively search for this information as the popular media outlets appear to leave this information from coming to the fore-front because of fear of political and economic sanctions. Here it is:

Mark Danner: The Logic of Torture: "What is difficult is separating what we now know from what we have long known but have mostly refused to admit. Though the events and disclosures of the last weeks have taken on the familiar clothing of a Washington scandal — complete with full-dress congressional hearings, daily leaks to reporters from victim and accused alike, and of course the garish, spectacular photographs and videos from Abu Ghraib — beyond that bright glare of revelation lies a dark area of unacknowledged clarity. Behind the exotic brutality so painstakingly recorded in Abu Ghraib, and the multiple tangled plotlines that will be teased out in the coming weeks and months about responsibility, knowledge, and culpability, lies a simple truth, well known but not yet publicly admitted in Washington: that since the attacks of September 11, 2001, officials of the United States, at various locations around the world, from Bagram in Afghanistan to Guantanamo in Cuba to Abu Ghraib in Iraq, have been torturing prisoners. They did this, in the felicitous phrasing of General Taguba's report, in order to 'exploit [them] for actionable intelligence' and they did it, insofar as this is possible, with the institutional approval of the United States government, complete with memoranda from the President's counsel and officially promulgated decisions, in the case of Afghanistan and Guantanamo, about the nonapplicability of the Geneva Conventions and, in the case of Iraq, about at least three different sets of interrogation policies, two of them modeled on earlier practice in Afghanistan and Cuba."