Even the Washington Post Not Buying Torture Coverup

The Washington Post signals that perhaps the time has come for even the Washington Post to start taking the U.S. torture policy seriously. Their editorial yesterday is titled War Crimes and reads in part—

Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in the spring the administration’s whitewashers — led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — have contended that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists, that they were limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib in 2003, that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of terrorism suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false.…

[T]he appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for the documented torture and killing of foreign prisoners by this American government.

Will the Senate do more than toss a few grandstanding rhetorical questions at Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales? The Democrats, at least, are still showing little sign that they care much about the torture policy. Dubya apparently is confident that they won’t make much of a fuss, since he’s also renominating another torture memo alumnus to the U.S. Court of Appeals:

Among the candidates the president said on Thursday he would renominate is William J. Haynes Ⅱ, the Pentagon’s general counsel, who has been deeply embroiled in controversy over memorandums he wrote or supervised that secretly authorized harsh treatment, even torture, for detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq. Mr. Haynes’s nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, based in Richmond, Va., was suspended when the issue erupted and he was asked by the Judiciary Committee to provide material about his role in the issue and failed to do so.

So you want some numbers on U.S. Arms Sales: Agreements with and Deliveries to Major Clients, 1996–2003 do you?

There are more torture documents on the way. If you aren’t outraged now, you’d better hurry, because pretty soon it’s liable to become trendy. You’ve seen the FBI memos; now it’s the CIA’s turn to start coughing ’em up: “The U.S. government lost a bid Monday to block civil rights groups from obtaining CIA records of its internal investigation into abuse of detainees held by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.”