The Daily Background
| Report: Nobody in the last Administration questioned the history of the torture they were using
by Arlen Parsa
You know what they say… those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. Case in point, brought to us by the Bush Administration:
In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.
This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.
[…]
The top officials [Tenet] briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.
… Nor did they know that the same techniques they authorized had been used to coerce false confessions out of American G.I.s during the Korean War, etc etc etc.
