All torture all the time

Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side, is being previewed by the NY Times, and the most disturbing revelation is that the International Red Cross warned the C.I.A. over a year ago that the techniques being used were “categorically” torture, and that they could leave authorizing officials of the U.S. Government subject to prosecution in the International Courts.

A friend tipped me off to this clip from Countdown (with Rachel Maddow, not Olbermann, which is an improvement IMHO).

Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley, whose money quote is at the end of a long clip:

“I never thought in my lifetime that we would say that, that we’ve become like Serbia, where an international tribunal has to come in to force us to apply the rule of law.

And I never thought I would see a Congress, a Democratic-led Congress, refuse to take actions, even with the pre-eminent institution of the Red Cross saying, this clearly is torture, and torture is a war crime, they are still refusing to take meaningful action.

So we’ve come to this ignoble moment, where we could be forced into a tribunal, and forced to face the rule of law that we have refused to apply to ourselves.”

The entire clip is below, but before you go, the next time you talk to someone who defends the use of torture with a “whatever it takes” defense, you can share with them a little known fact about this disaster in Iraq: It was justified with the use of false information provided under torture. Via Frank Rich today in the NYTimes, also a commentary on this book:

The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq. Exhibit A, revisited in “The Dark Side,” is Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an accused Qaeda commander whose torture was outsourced by the C.I.A. to Egypt. His fabricated tales of Saddam’s biological and chemical W.M.D. — and of nonexistent links between Iraq and Al Qaeda — were cited by President Bush in his fateful Oct. 7, 2002, Cincinnati speech ginning up the war and by Mr. Powell in his subsequent United Nations presentation on Iraqi weaponry. Two F.B.I. officials told Ms. Mayer that Mr. al-Libi later explained his lies by saying: “They were killing me. I had to tell them something.”

That “something” was crucial in sending us into the quagmire that, five years later, has empowered Iran and compromised our ability to counter the very terrorists that torture was supposed to thwart.

And am I the only one who missed this last month?

The clip: