As the apologists fanned out over the weekend, and as the country's attention span wanes and the new normal asserts itself, some of us decline to let go of what was revealed about the war criminals amongst us, particularly those who bragged about what they'd arranged, got all puffed up with the courage to be savages, and who already had benefitted in their careers mightily from The Great Mulligan demanded by the last administration for "keeping us safe," if you don't count the anthrax attacks and that other one, in which 3000 people died. There is not a single defense raised by these barbarians that has not been raised in the past by people who wanted to torture people with impunity. They can't even summon up the common humanity to concoct original alibis.

For example, the argument put forth by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove that what is described in the Senate report was not really torture because we made sure that doctors were on standby, and that we waterboarded people more carefully than did we did in the Philippines, or than the Japanese Imperial Army did in the Pacific. This, then, from Philip Knightley's The First Casualty, his invaluable history of war correspondents and the governments that manipulated them. He is writing about the tactics used by the French Army in Algeria.

Temoignage Chretien took up the issue and in 1959, it published two controversial articles...The second article revealed the existence in Algeria of a special training camp for officers where the conditions under which torture could be practised were taught. Temoignage Chretien said that the school's name was Joan of Arc camp and that officers were told the conditions necessary for "humane torture" -- it must be clean; it must not be witnessed by young soldiers; it must not happen in the presence of sadists; an officer must be present; it must stop the moment the man talked; and it must cause no permanent injury. Water torture and electric shock were both considered suitable, the article said.

"Humane torture" is rather like "clean coal."

And then, there's the excuse that these people we were torturing were somehow superhuman, whose skills were such that we had no choice. Again, Knightley, quoting the account of a French war correspondent named Robert Lambotte, who eventually was expelled from Algeria by the French government:

"I had a long conversation on a cafe terrace in Bone with an almost angelic-looking young German from the Foreign Legion, a worthy heir of the SS, who talked in the most casual and matter-of-fact way about the manner in which his unit tortured and killed captured Algerians. 'We've got to extract information, but without torture, you get nowhere."

There is nothing exceptional about American torture. There is nothing exceptional about its stated motivation. There is nothing exceptional about the physicians and psychologists who took part in the program, and who ought to have their licenses lifted yesterday. There is nothing exceptional about the politicians who ordered it, the officials who conducted it, the officlals who covered it up, and the officials who are out there now defending it. There is nothing exceptional about it, not even the pale and puny excuses for it. There is nothing exceptional about America. It is a country that tortures.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/A_Brutal_Act_Of_Unoriginal_Thinking