[With a hat tip, but no apologies, to Dr. Dean]
Reading through all the diaries and comments about torture, I am left with a lot of questions. There are some things I want to know...
I want to know if, during the four years Barack Obama served in the US Senate, he ever said that we were torturing people, or that he thought we were torturing people, or that we might be torturing people, or that we were not torturing people, or that he didn't think we were torturing people, or that he didn't know one way or the other.
I want to know if Barack Obama ever said anything that might clarify whether he bought into the parsing of waterboarding as torture and "aggressive interrogation techniques" as not torture.
I want to know...
...if Barack Obama ever said whether he thought that "aggressive interrogation techniques," "waterboarding," or "torture" can be appropriate under some circumstances, and I want to know if he explained what those circumstances might be.
But most of all...
I want to know how the president who spent four years of The Time of Torture as a member of an arm of government that is supposed to be a check on the power of the executive branch can release documents describing torture that took place on his watch (because, yes, it was his watch too) and not address any of these questions.
I want to know.