Blog Update (April 24, 2009): Actual U.S. JPRA Torture Document Available as PDF

"And now your highness, we will discuss the location of your hidden rebel base."
-- Darth Vader -- Star Wars -- 1977

Greetings. It is now very clear that President Obama significantly misjudged and underestimated the intensity of reactions related to the George W. Bush Administration's "enhanced interrogation" (torture) policies. Instead of relegating the associated issues to the past, the (completely appropriate) release of the Bush-era torture memos has exploded a slowly smoldering flame into a vast firestorm, and Obama's declaration that U.S. policy has changed in these regards will not prevent the conflagration.

The waterboardings, shackles, collars, leashes, stress positions, beatings, extraordinary renditions, and host of other horrors promulgated by Bush and his underlings in the name of national security, have created a snowball that may well grow to rival the likes of any previous scandals that this nation has ever endured.

And in many respects, the topic of torture is more fundamentally important than most of the issues that have grabbed our collective attention in the past. Bill Clinton's sexual excesses and even Richard Nixon's Watergate seem to pale in comparison to the ancient and utterly basic ethical and moral issues surrounding torture.

Thanks to the Internet, we'll have a front row seat as these events unfold, in a manner impossible in the past. Every possible Net venue is already being utilized to disseminate, discuss, analyze, and otherwise ponder the basic "good vs. evil" aspects of this situation. This is the Internet at its finest.

Various military personnel who were condemned as renegades at Abu Ghraib are taking to the airwaves and the Net to proclaim their relief at the memos revelations that -- indeed as they had claimed all along -- the pattern of their behaviors was dictated from the highest levels of the Bush administration.

Now preserved on the Internet for all time is a remarkably candid (warning: and profane) outburst yesterday by Shepherd Smith, a popular Fox News anchor, who verbally exploded in reaction to suggestions that torture might be OK "if it produced results."

Mr. Smith indeed hit the heart of the matter dead center. The GOP and ex-torturer-in-chief Dick Cheney have been attempting to push the degrading concept that torture not only is acceptable if it can be shown to work, but that even discussing the issue may have violated the privacy rights of associated parties. I view these lines of argument as nothing less than pure evil. One can only imagine how Cheney's outspoken "logic" may affect the futures of our own brave military men captured in future conflicts. God help them from our adversaries who will quote Cheney and his cronies as justification for those foreign torturers.

We are about to embark on a televised and Internet-enabled investigation of the modern incarnations of a most ancient evil -- torture -- as was applied under cover of authority, and with our national honor and pride victimized as a result of those activities.

You probably remember all of the attention paid to Bill Clinton's affair, even if you're too young to remember Watergate. "Torturegate" (I haven't heard anyone say this yet in the media, but I'm sure they will!) seems likely to rise to similar or even higher levels of global focus -- and for damned good reasons.

This is going to be a learning experience like none other. We are about to explore in the most graphic sense possible what it means to be Americans, in terms of goals, ethics, morality, and simple humanity. For how we behave under stress and attack tells far more about us than our behavior on better days.

Fasten your seatbelts.

--Lauren--

Update: AP is reporting that by May 28 a "substantial number" of prisoner abuse photos reaching "far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib" will be released by the federal government. These apparently are being released as the result of an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit dating back to 2004. The Bush administration had reportedly (and unsurprisingly) refused to release the photos in question.

Additional Note (April 24, 2009): The photos to be released now reportedly number in the hundreds.