Tortured Confessions

Nice to see that our European allies have been able to focus attention on the illegal acts of torture being carried out in our name by the current Administration, a task that our own "independent media" had not quite gotten around to at this point, four years after 9/11. Today Condi Rice announced, as a new policy of the US Government, that inhumane interrogation tactics would no longer be permitted at US military installations overseas (Herald-Tribune story).

Given the fact that:

• Memos from the White House and Justice Department demonstrated several years ago that the Administration was approving new techniques of cruel & inhumane interrogation for use by the CIA and military;
• Chief among these was a memo by current Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, written in his capacity as White House Counsel (i.e., legal counsel to the President);
• Also among these was a signed certification by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approving these techniques;
• Vice President Dick Cheney is known to have sponsored this strategy;
• Since the introduction of John McCain's bill reiterating the legislative ban on such tactics, and since it gained approval 96-0 on the Senate Floor, Dick Cheney has been secretly working to either kill the bill in the House, in conference, or to preserve an exception for CIA interrogations overseas;
• Such tactics are outlawed by the UN Convention on Torture, to which the US is a signatory;
• These tactics are also outlawed by the enabling US legislation, passed by Congress in 1994;
• If any of this torture had yielded the slightest bit of useful intelligence, you can be sure we would have heard about it by now; and
• Secretary Rice's latest revision of policy is de facto a confession to all of the above;

I really only have one question left:

What is it going to take to try this lot as war criminals?