The Torture Issue: The Debate Over The "Enhanced Interrogation Methods" That George Bush Authorized!

Why is there a debate over what constitutes torture? Since these "enhanced interrogation techniques" included waterboarding,doesn't that classify these "techniques" as being nothing short of torture? Why are we redefining torture now?

Do not tell me it is because George Bush had to do anything that he could to protect Americans after 9/11!!What the hell was President Bush doing before 9/11? How come Bush & Cheney did not do all that they could to protect us before the terrorists struck those towers with planes?

They had been warned by the Clinton administration & the information was available to them.Everyone that pats Bush & Cheney on the back because there have been no terror attacks since 9/11 never seem to care about what they did before 9/11. Here's more from a 2005 NY Times article:

"The White House said tonight that President Bush had been warned by American intelligence agencies in early August that Osama bin Laden was seeking to hijack aircraft but that the warnings did not contemplate the possibility that the hijackers would turn the planes into guided missiles for a terrorist attack.

''It is widely known that we had information that bin Laden wanted to attack the United States or United States interests abroad,'' Ari Fleischer, the president's press secretary, said this evening. ''The president was also provided information about bin Laden wanting to engage in hijacking in the traditional pre-9/11 sense, not for the use of suicide bombing, not for the use of an airplane as a missile.''

Nonetheless the revelation by the White House, made in response to a report about the intelligence warning this evening on CBS News, is bound to fuel Congressional demands for a deeper investigation into why American intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had failed to put together individual pieces of evidence that, in retrospect, now seem to suggest what was coming.

In the past few days, government officials have acknowledged for the first time that an F.B.I. agent in Phoenix had urged the F.B.I. headquarters to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools. That memorandum also cited Mr. bin Laden by name and suggested that his followers could use the schools to train for terror operations, officials who have seen the memorandum said.

Administration officials reached this evening said the warning given to Mr. Bush did not come from the F.B.I. or from the information developed by the Phoenix agent. Instead, it was provided as part of the C.I.A. briefing he is given each morning, suggesting that it was probably based on evidence gathered abroad.

The C.I.A. had been listening intently over the July 4 holiday last year, after what one investigator called ''a lot of static in the system suggesting something was coming.'' But then the evidence disappeared as quickly as it had arisen, and by August, officials have said, little was heard from Al Qaeda.

The warning of the hijacking was given to the president at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., where he was on vacation.

Taken together, the news of the C.I.A. warning and the information developed separately by the F.B.I. explains Mr. Bush's anger after Sept. 11 that intelligence gathered on American soil and abroad was not being centrally analyzed and that the agencies were not working well together.

Several times he has told audiences that he is working on solving that problem, and these days he is briefed jointly by the F.B.I and the C.I.A., ensuring that each hears information from the other agency.

It was not clear this evening why the White House waited eight months after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington to reveal what Mr. Bush had been told.

But Mr. Fleischer noted that in the daily flow of intelligence information the president receives, the warning of what appeared to be the threat of a conventional hijacking was not as serious as it appears in retrospect. ''We were a peacetime society, and the F.B.I. had a different mission,'' he said."(END OF EXCERPT)Read the rest here.

So,after 9/11 happened,President Bush decided to get serious about the terrorist threats.People seem to want to excuse the fact that intelligence information about hijackings was disregarded.But,we rush to congratulate the very same folks for keeping our country safe after it had already been attacked.Instead of being angry that the intelligence that President Bush was given had been set to the side because it didn't seem that "serious."

Even more on why we should be mad about the terrorist attacks that caused the Bush administration to authorize torture from a 2002 USA Today article:

"The uproar over how much President Bush knew before Sept. 11 about the threat of terrorist hijackings seemed to have eased Sunday, but some of his advisers worry that the furor could cause long-term damage to a vital Bush asset: trust. Americans have shown a high level of trust in Bush, and his job-approval ratings have made some Democrats think twice about challenging his policies.

In a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll this month, 77% said Bush is honest and trustworthy, including some who praised his character although they disagreed with his policies. Nearly three-quarters of those polled said he puts the country's interests ahead of his own.

That reservoir of trust has sustained Bush through setbacks in the war on terrorism and the recent crisis in the Middle East. Aides hope it will sustain him through the current controversy.

But if Americans are left with the impression that Bush was warned about Osama bin Laden's plans and failed to take action, advisers say privately, his credibility could suffer. That could drive down his approval ratings and make it more difficult for him to win support for the war, a future attack on Iraq and his domestic agenda.

That's one reason Bush and his advisers reacted swiftly and vociferously last week when news broke that the president had been told in an intelligence briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, that terrorists were considering hijackings. The Bush team was determined to depict Democrats' demands for explanations as politically motivated.

Bush and his aides were also angry about some Democrats' harsh criticism. They decided to publicly display their anger in part to reinforce the idea that Bush is too honest to even consider misleading the nation.

Vice President Cheney made that point again Sunday. He said on NBC's Meet the Press that he has "a deep sense of anger that anyone would suggest that the president of the United States had advance knowledge that he failed to act on. I thought it was beyond the pale."(END OF EXCERPT)Read the rest here.

And we all know how trustworthy they are now.Bush & Cheney weren't honest about what they knew before 9/11.The information was there to prevent those attacks before the terrorist flew those planes into the Twin Towers.It just was not taken seriously.So,did we really need to resort to torture in order to gather the intelligence to prevent future attacks?

The CIA & the FBI were perfectly capable of gathering intelligence before 9/11 without torturing anyone.Both agencies warned President Bush about these terrorist attacks.So,again,there was no reason to resort to torture to gather information.It's just further proof of how badly President Bush handled his time in office.He did not do everything that he could to protect the American people before 9/11.And that's not hindsight.It is the cold,hard truth that most folks don't like to admit.George Bush was not a good president from the start.Shame on us for giving him two terms!

He destroyed America's status in the world with his lies about weapons of mass destruction & torture.Remember,George Bush claimed that America does not torture. And what angers me most is that we never had to do that in the first place.No matter how you gain the intelligence,your administration has to be astute enough to use it.

Waterboarding is illegal & inhumane.If we care about the treatment of animals,then why aren't we concerned about the torture of human beings?!!Even if it supposedly worked!Although I'm not convinced that it did.And neither was the author of this Jan. 2009 New American article:

"Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo castigated President Obama’s decision to ban torture and close Guantanamo in a January 29 Wall Street Journal opinion column that somehow avoided the use of the word "torture." As we shall see, his column was a dance of obviously false assumptions and false conclusions designed to justify the Bush policy of torture (in his column Woo calls it "tough interrogation") and endless detention without trial.

Yoo was the primary author of what was popularly called the “torture memo,” which was issued under the byline of his Justice Department boss Jay S. Bybee, so his column in the Wall Street Journal was perhaps not surprising. The torture memo purported to give legal cover for the Bush administration to engage in practices universally regarded before September 11 as torture while at the same time denying it was torture.

In his column, Yoo criticized Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo, claiming that “the civilian law-enforcement system cannot prevent terrorist attacks.” He implied: 1. Bush stopped all terrorist attacks; and 2. Obama would rely exclusively upon local police and Miranda rights for international terrorist networks.

It should be stressed that the Bush military enforcement system hasn’t prevented attacks on Americans. American soldiers have suffered thousands of deaths and tens of thousands of injuries from thousands of terrorist attacks under the Bush policy, resulting in far more than the deaths from September 11. But Yoo doesn’t count terror attacks against our soldiers, implying that their lives do not mean as much as other people's lives."(END OF EXCERPT)Read the rest here.

And,remember the attack that torture supposedly prevented.Well,here's more on that falsehood from The Daily KOS:

"First of all, the background: No, Karl Rove, Marc Thiessen, and Fox News are not telling the truth when they claim that U.S. torture techniques prevented a 'west coast 9/11.'

Rove et al. claim that after CIA waterboarding, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave authorities information used to foil a plot to hijack an airplane with a shoe bomb and fly it into the tallest building in Los Angeles, the Library Tower (now known as the U.S. Bank Building).

In other words, Rove and his crew say torture saved America from another 9/11.

As Timothy Noah and Daily Kos TV have documented, however, the Rove timetable just doesn't add up. While KSM was arrested in March 2003, the plot was stopped in February 2002 -- more than a year earlier. Rove's tale could not possibly be true.

But like any pathological liar, Rove is pushing a lie containing threads of truth."(END OF EXCERPT)Read the rest here.

While everyone disputes what torture is,I remain astonished about the fact that our country is even having this conversation in the first place!We knew what the dangers were before 9/11.George Bush & Dick Cheney just didn't do enough to protect us.

I refuse to give them credit for torturing people & invading the privacy of every American after they failed to avert the terrorist hijackings that they were forewarned about.We don't know why we weren't attacked after 9/11.I'm going to thank God for that.Not George Bush & Dick Cheney.