It has now come to light that the detainee abuse in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan started when the Bush administration ordered our interrogators to use a document called: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."

This was a 1957 document that showed how the Chinese Communists tortured people -- in order to get false confessions! The only thing we changed was that we dropped the title of the document. Otherwise it is exactly the same. We have been using communist torture tactics that are designed to get false confessions. Meanwhile, The Bush administration has been calling it "enhanced interrogations" and saying we got "valuable intelligence" from it.

More details on the story here:




If you want to read the story of how we came to use this document for our own interrogations, you can click here. This is deplorable. Will anyone ever suffer the consequences for ordering this illegal torture? Will the press question John McCain on why he voted to allow the CIA to continue doing this? I wouldn't bank on it.

But if we do this, and no one ever gets punished for it, can we really say that America doesn't torture anymore?

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The New York Times has found previously unrevealed torture memos written in the second term of George W. Bush. The men responsible are Dick Cheney and his new chief of staff, David Addington (after the last one, Scooter Libby, was arrested). The man who slavishly put into effect these atrocities was Alberto Gonzales. This pathetic man didn't even question his overlords as they got him to agree to one heinous act upon another.

Despite warnings that these interrogation tactics would result in our troops being tortured if they were ever caught, the White House pressed on. They absolutely insisted that the Justice Department write memos that said that obvious violations of the War Crimes Act be considered legal now. And they had their perfect yes-man in Gonzales who never objected and did what he was told.

This incredible post by Andrew Sullivan (conservative blogger who no longer supports the Bush administration) explains how the Germans used what they called "enhanced interrogation" in 1937. He explains how it took on a life of its own and turned into the nightmare that became Nazi Germany.

As he carefully explains in his post, this is not to say that present day America is the same as what Nazi Germany became. That would be a ridiculous statement. It is to say that we should be careful in heading down certain paths because they lead to terrible and ugly places -- and gain momentum as time goes on.

When I see people defending torture in this country under the guise of getting tough with "terrorists" ( the Germans also used the word "terrorists" to describe some of their enemies) and when I see the audience cheering in the Republican primary debates when the candidates talk about "enhanced interrogation," I get a chill down my spine (to be fair John McCain came out strongly against torture in that debate, it was Giuliani and Romney who seemed so eager to cozy up to "enhanced interrogation techniques").