As usual, Dick Cheney, the talking meatsticks, the right wing noise machine and even some of us here are getting wrapped up in and lost in side issues and distractions – some of which may or may not ultimately be valid – when it comes to the recent events surrounding the revelations that not only did the Bush administration torture people, but they did so in order to extract false confessions so they could invade Iraq.
I’ll say that one again, because, frankly, every distraction – every "what did Pelosi really know", every "there are documents that may show torture worked", every other argument about the never to ever happen "ticking time bomb" or "do whatever we have to in order to keep America safe" – takes away from the one main core point that the discussion should start and end with.
The Bush administration authorized torture in order to extract false confessions linking Iraq to al Qaeda and create a pretext to invade a sovereign nation that neither had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, nor was an "imminent threat".
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Pelosi is the latest shiny object distraction – how she is "under fire" and is disagreeing with the CIA about what she may or may not have been briefed about. And in time, the truth must come out about this.
However, nothing – absolutely NOTHING – should divert the direction and main point of the conversation. Torture is not a partisan issue. Torture is not something that can be debated. Torture is illegal. And torturing people in order to get a false confession and invade another country (especially when very many other excuses were given for such invasion) is more than illegal.
And this was all done by the Bush administration with the knowledge and approval by Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and (according to Cheney), Bush himself.
This is finally starting to get out there as a story – not just that torture occurred, not just that it occurred with the knowledge and intent of the upper echelon of the Bush administration, but that it was done in order to create support for a bogus war for which no justification existed, and to take advantage of a scared American public who was just attacked.
THIS is the story. THIS is where the focus needs to be. And when it starts to stray, it MUST be brought back to this one simple, powerful and disgusting point.
Everything else is a shiny object distraction meant to blur the lines, meant to create doubt and meant to shift the blame.
We must make sure it doesn’t happen – and whether you agree or not, this is not something that Obama or his administration will do, at least not more than they have done. Which, by the way, has given the progressive community and America all of the tools and information necessary in order to make it so that the ONLY option is to investigate and prosecute wherever necessary.
Otherwise, this opportunity to redeem ourselves as a country and ensure that it never happens again will have passed us by – and THAT will be all of our faults.