And then we get to the familiar punchline: the cover-up:
Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify and locate the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.
Abu Ghraib didn’t seem to change much:
On June 25, 2004, nearly two months after the disclosure of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, an F.B.I. agent in Iraq sent an e-mail message to his superiors in Washington, warning that a detainee captured by Task Force 6-26 had suspicious burn marks on his body. The detainee said he had been tortured.
Does Mark Levin consider burn marks on a detainee’s body evidence of torture? How about "electric shocks to detainees with stun guns"? Or does he have some other Orwellian term to excuse this?
The administration continues its absurd public mantra that "we do not torture." It’s empirically untrue. The most generous explanation of it is that the president and his staff don’t know what they unleashed with their memos. But after Abu Ghraib, they have absolutely no excuse. Their refusal to acknowledge the McCain Amendment suggests, at best, continued denial and, at worst, a clear decision to allow this kind of behavior to continue on the down-low. In short: either Rumsfeld is a liar and a torture-enforcer or he is an incompetent whose management of the military has led to one of the darkest stains on the military’s honor in its history. Either way, it is a scandal he is still in office. Every day he remains defense secretary is an implicit statement by the president that the United States has and does practise torture. And that this president still has no interest in preventing it.
Oh, and there’s no evidence that this sadism produced any useful intelligence in any case. Most experts will tell you this is par for the course. As Orwell noted, the point of torture is torture.
The Dish 