odds are it is still happening right now as we speak

Condemn it. Problem is majority either approved of torture or didn't care. You could see that in the coverage too. A day or two after release, it was pretty much a non story. Today most probably forgot all about it. Of course Sony is important to Americans...lol.

country to not allow it to become a non story. To support those who have the guts to keep on talking about it, like Glenn Greenwald, rather than joining the smear campaigns against them, and to keep on expressing horror that we live in a country where TORTURE is acceptable.

But even here on this forum, there are people who refuse to join the Whistle Blowers who reported on torture, see Chelsea Manning eg, and the few real journalists left, see Glenn Greenwald, because their politics are more important to them than JUSTICE.

Every Republican president beginning with Nixon has committed capital crimes, yet none of them has ever been held to account. That's why this just keeps going - getting worse, in fact.

See Clinton, eg, re the Reagan crimes. There were convictions but there could have more, Clinton however, ended any chance of that.

Obama simply 'moved forward' and let them off the hook.

So all are complicit to one degree or another and the system will continue until an overwhelming majority of the people, rather than defending their teams, simply oppose these horrible practices and refuse to be complicit themselves.

Along with everybody else, we have always tortured. All you have to do is watch a few period WWII movies to figure that out (not to mention 24 and every other modern movie and tv show) In our popular culture, torture works, so it is used. Period.

But those desperate fictional heroes always knew torture was wrong, inhuman (when done to us at least) and there would be just punishment (in fiction, usually the torturer dies a heroic and justified death, due to the taint of his breaking the taboo. Maybe he'd get a pardon from the president, but he would have to face the music at some point for his crime.

Bush and Cheney made torture the policy of not even last resort and no punishment or justice. That's how they pissed on us for the next hundred years. At least. It works, so we do it. Try to stop us.

Yes, since we will not bring our own criminals to justice (don't remind me about our enormous heaving prison population--that's social engineering, not punishment) we will continue to be who we have always been. Number one.

that this shit is trickling down to us peons in the form of police brutality and oppression? This is way past the bud stage. There is no nipping it. The tap root must be extracted and destroyed. Anything less is not moving "forward" but condemning us to remain bogged down in the filth.

Not unless -- as you say -- we take it out by the roots.