Torture refuses to go away

This neat ideological package asserted the unchallengeable power of a “unitary executive” above constitutional checks and balances, national law, and international treaties. Echoing Richard Nixon’s circular self-justification of three decades earlier, Justice Department lawyer Steven Bradbury told Congress: “The president is always right.” 

The Project for the New American Century, a think tank with which Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and other officials were associated, laid down intellectual covering fire for these policies. With the United States the only superpower left, the PNAC apparently concluded that history was over and that the Bush administration had an unprecedented opportunity to remake the world in its own image and demonstrate the futility of resistance. 

The policies it engendered effectively said to the international community: “The rules we used to agree on no longer apply to us. Here’s exactly how far above international law we are. What are you going to do about it?” 

Strategically, the Bush-Cheney project targeted conceptual smart bombs on the very idea of human rights. The rest of the world got the message, and the cracks in the foundations of U.S. national security have yet to be repaired.…

Consortium News
Finding Creative Ways to Torture
Peter Costantini

US torture did not begin with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, but rather was a feature of President Ronald Reagan's program for Latin America and it continued in the G. H. W. Bush administration in which Dick Cheney served as US Secretary of Defense.

Ronald Reagan’s Torture

Robert Parry (Originally published on Sept. 8, 2009)

Torture did not cease between the Bush administrations. Bill Clinton authorized CIA rendition to nations known to practice torture.

Barack Obama famously said that that the United States does not torture but left open the question of rendition.

See Wikipedia, Extraordinary Rendition. How's that for Orwellian double-speak?