Bush is treated with honor and respect by our current president.
Cheney is accorded fawning attention by our media.

Going back aways, I remember the campaign of 2004 when Kerry and Edwards were given the opportunity to rid the country of those scoundrels.

Here was Kerry, faced with the biggest liar and worse president in our history - and he couldn't say anything. Of course, he was protecting his own keister because he supported Bush's wars. He had the choice of either revealing himself as a dupe, (not good politically) - or trying to defend his actions. It didn't fly. just as it didn't work for Hillary in 2008.

Here was Kerry - and he couldn't bring himself to say to a national audience that his opponent had deliberately lied to the American people to get us into two wars. So he mumbled about Tora Bora and let that sleezebag Bush off the hook.

And there was Edwards. The poverty tour guy. What a phony if ever there was. He's faced with Gargoyle Cheney. And he couldn't confront him either. He winds up praising Cheney as a loving father.

Let me outta here!

Isn't there anybody in politics willing to tell it like it T-I-is?

This is why I sometimes try to urge people to watch and listen to Malcolm X.

This is the way, imo, an honest politician sounds.
And, the man is brilliant.

If its in the range of "torture" its among the mildest ever practiced.

"CIA interrogators forcibly kept his head under the water while he struggled to breathe and beat him repeatedly, hitting him with a truncheon-like object and smashing his head against a wall, officials said." He is still in Guantanamo Bay.

And we, as with the Germans in WW2, have gotten quite good at training these fairly normal people.

After the initial phase, torturing, beating, waterboarding, breaking limbs and the rest can apparently become quite enjoyable if one reads the anecdotal evidence of those who engaged in these activities.

One of the ways we justify ourselves is to think that we are morally superior to our adversaries.

But the simple truth is, imo, that people are the same all over.
With the proper indoctrination - skillful manipulation of loyalty and love feelings - ordinary people can be molded into monsters.

From the actual reports they did little or nothing to keep us safe in our beds.

overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.

Let's review the information contained in that excerpt, shall we. The critical pieces of intelligence were surrendered prior to the use of torture.

excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little,if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain reminded people Thursday that some Japanese were tried and hanged for torturing American prisoners during World War II with techniques that included waterboarding.

"There should be little doubt from American history that we consider that as torture otherwise we wouldn't have tried and convicted Japanese for doing that same thing to Americans," McCain said during a news conference.
...
"I would also hope that he would not want to be associated with a technique which was invented in the Spanish Inquisition, was used by Pol Pot in one of the great eras of genocide in history and is being used on Burmese monks as we speak," the Arizona senator said. "America is a better nation than that."

McCain is referencing the Tokyo Trials, officially known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. After World War II, an international coalition convened to prosecute Japanese soldiers charged with torture. At the top of the list of techniques was water-based interrogation, known variously then as "water cure," "water torture" and "waterboarding," according to the charging documents. It simulates drowning.

R. John Pritchard, a historian and lawyer who is a top scholar on the trials, said the Japanese felt the ends justified the means. "The rapid and effective collection of intelligence then, as now, was seen as vital to a successful struggle, and in addition, those who were engaged in torture often felt that whatever pain and anguish was suffered by the victims of torture was nothing less than the just deserts of the victims or people close to them," he said.

In a recent journal essay, Judge Evan Wallach, a member of the U.S. Court of International Trade and an adjunct professor in the law of war, writes that the testimony from American soldiers about this form of torture was gruesome and convincing. A number of the Japanese soldiers convicted by American judges were hanged, while others received lengthy prison sentences or time in labor camps.