"We torture, illegally, by directive; the directives come from the top; those who torture know it is probably criminal; when we torture prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, they will tell us anything they think we want to hear -- including implicate themselves falsely, as many reports from Human Rights Watch and other rights organizations testify to -- to make the torture stop; and the White House routinely uses that faked or coerced unverifiable 'intelligence' to buttress its wholesale assault on our liberties.

"As the CIA tries to spin its apparent crimes and claim that its waterboarding and other forms of criminal torture 'saved lives' -- while conveniently offering no evidence to back that up, and while the administration withholds evidence to the contrary from the lawyers of the detainees -- we should bear in mind that the decades of research on torture summarized in the magisterial survey 'The Question of Torture' show beyond the shadow of a doubt that prisoners being tortured will indeed 'say anything.' When American prisoners were tortured by the North Vietnamese, their confessions were phrased in Communist cliches.

"We should note too -- as the White House tries to muddy the waters by pretending that there has ever been a 'debate' about such acts as these -- that the US in the past prosecuted waterboarding itself: when the Japanese had waterboarded US prisoners they were convicted with sentences of fifteen years of hard labor.

'We should also bear in mind that the Bush White House has deliberately crafted its memos and laws -- such as the Bybee/Gonzales 'torture memo' and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 -- with a keen eye to seeking indemnification of its own guilt regarding having committed evident crimes, because those involved know quite well that acts committed could be criminal acts. (An historical note worth mentioning, when we consider how hyperalert the Bush White House has been to the issue of seeking retroactively to protect itself and its subordinates from prosecution for war and other crimes, is that the Nuremberg Trials eventually swept up influential Nazi industrialists such as Fritz Thyssen of IG Farben -- who relied on Auschwitz slave labor -- and with whom Prescott Bush had collaborated in amassing the Bush family millions; some of the sentences given to those industrialists found guilty in the postwar trials were severe.) For a moment postwar, the legal spotlight was also about to search out and hold accountable the several prominent US investors who had partnered with Nazi industrialists (see the exhaustively documented study of US/Nazi corporate collaboration, IBM and the Holocaust.)

"Prosecution for war crimes and other criminal acts, which the administration so clearly recognizes that it may well have committed -- which its legislation so clearly shows it realized it may well commit in advance of the commission -- is the only consequence the Bush team seems to be really afraid of as it attempts its multiple subversions of the rule of law. This is why the nation's grassroots call for a truly independent investigation into possible criminality is so very urgent and so necessary to restore the rule of law in our nation." Complete post is here. (Copyright - Naomi Wolf.)