It's worth spending a little bit more time on the torture issue currently facing the nation. I left a comment the other day on Greg Sargent's blog about what surprises me in this whole debate about torture is we've seemed to gloss over the fact that we are admitting to torturing prisoners. The line has been moved from should we torture to look how great torturing is. In terms of a set public policy, torture has always been something America rose above. The last 8 years, however, it was a state sanctioned policy of the Republican administration endorsed all the way up to the president.Furthermore, something that didn't even dawn on me until this morning is that not only was it the policy of the Bush administration to torture prisoners, they actually used torture to get prisoners to confess to known non-factual statements concerning Iraq and bin Laden, something the government knew was a lie even in 2001-2002. In other words, the government used torture to get prisoners to give false confessions, proving people will pretty much admit to anything while being tortured, including things the U.S. government knew weren't true but wanted a confession to anyway.
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