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Bush: We tortured people, OK?
This from yesterday's Washington Post:
- Given several opportunities at yesterday's press conference to express his opposition to torture, President Bush responded repeatedly with a legalistic answer that leaves him vulnerable to continued speculation about the role he and his top advisers played in setting interrogation rules in the war on terror.
Dana Milbank and Dana Priest write in The Washington Post: "President Bush said Thursday that he expects U.S. authorities to follow the law when interrogating prisoners abroad, but he declined to say whether he believes torture is permitted under the law. "Pressed repeatedly during a news conference here about a Justice Department memo saying torture could be justified in the war on terrorism, Bush said only that U.S. interrogators had to follow the law. Asked whether he agrees with the Justice Department view, Bush said he could not remember whether he had seen the memorandum."
James Harding writes in the Financial Times: "[W]hen asked whether he had authorised the use of aggressive interrogation techniques to fight the war on terrorism, Mr Bush resorted repeatedly to a legalistic formulation: 'The authorisation I issued was that anything we did would conform to US laws and would be consistent with international treaty obligations.' " Shannon McCaffrey and Sumana Chatterjee write for Knight Ridder Newspapers that Bush "sidestepped a question about whether torture was ever justified."
So much for the whole thing about Lynndie acting alone.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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