This audio segment from The Intercept is highly relevant and illustrative of how this all came to be.
My favorite sound bites are "In one e-mail with the subject 'Torture Update'", and "We will not be briefing the president on this".
At one point, the CIA and Senate had mutually filed criminal prosecution referrals against one another over the cover up.
https://theintercept.com/2019/12/04/george-bush-barack-obama...
Now imagine hypothetical scenario. Some innocent victim of the torture program or victim's relative decides to take revenge on USA by committing a mass murder or a terrorist attack. Wouldn't it be kinda justified? With an exception of kids, how many Americans are really blameless for these actions? They elected the leaders who allowed it (both Republicans - Bush and Democrats - Obama), they don't hold people who committed it accountable, they didn't try to make amends to victims or reimburse them. Many people go to BLM protest, but this torture was much worse than that and Americans just ... don't care.
How is it possible that people weren't held accountable for this? And how come the US government still hasn't tried to remedy the situation? Are those people going to be held in captivity with no charges until their death?
The United States should be better than this, makes me sad to be American.
A reminder of Christopher Hitchens' account of waterboarding:
this seems to be just a copy-and-pasted article from the New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/cia-torture-d...
The USA is still sadly lacking a "gulag archipelago" book, that will expose to polite society the scale of these practices.
This website is barely usable on mobile. Slow, full of ads, and the entire page becomes dark as if a modal had been opened, yet it's nowhere to be found and closed. Won't read.
If you are interested in the topic, i can highly recommend "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror" from Alfred McCoy for an analysis how torture changed and how it works today.
This source document was linked in the above article, and I found it pretty interesting. "Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative"
It describes in some detail the apparently authorized techniques and levels of torture. There's also a section about how the Navy already has some history with using waterboarding.
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/legacy/2010/...
Five hours, 140 points later, and the link hasn't been updated to the CORRECT story: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/cia-torture-d...
In defence of "whataboutism" argument
The best phrase I heard about that is:
"A sum of two half-wrongs don't make one right"
Not as single country that went on torturing people can be a moral high mark.
Even if we have hard time finding countries who have not tainted themselves with torture over the last 2 decades, we should never accept torture as a norm.
Even if all major powers of the world were tainted by it, it just means that they all miss that high standard now.
Will not name countries here, but think yourself.
This is literally cut and paste plagiarized from the New York Times article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/us/politics/cia-torture-d...