Team Torture!

In 2002 and continuing into 2003, deep down in the bowels of the White House, inside the dark and serious White House situation room these pseudo serious people got together, probably at the request of Dick Cheney, to discuss torture. You can almost hear him snarl: "And while we are at it we can't be handling these people with kid gloves, we can't afford to baby these people, Mr President we need to discuss some enhanced interrogation techniques, this way we get out ahead of this thing ya know, stake out the ground as it were before some hot heads go willy nilly torturing...err, i mean interrogating people. If we give them guidance it will be better, leading the way is the smart move here..."

How titillating it must have been for them. Honored, I am sure, to have to help decide which barbaric 15th century techniques were to be used by the United States in its quest for justice. These meetings must have been absurd, which techniques did they throw out? And who didn't like the rack? That's one that didn't make the cut. I presume there was levity, or at least what passes for it with these humorless people. "I will tell you what's torture, this coffee, whew!" hardy har har... Did they have some kind of stupid code name for this group? The Torquemada 12 or something, or was just a mundane "Team Torture". We have heard of all the principals who were there, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Tenet, and my favorite, Rumsfeld. But what staffers were there? was Karen Hughes there? Hadley? Libby? Somebody was there taking notes and fawning over our brave leaders.

I have to agree with Digby though, the most shocking thing this weekend is the complete silence from the corporate media on this. 6 of the top people in the Bush administration were meeting for over a year, in the White House, to discuss torture techniques and the President knew and approved of it. But you can go to any of the news websites cbsnews.com, abcnews.com, etc and you wont find the story, well, maybe if you dig a little. Google News is a perfect example, it's an aggregate of the online news, even if you drill down to "U.S.", and/or Top Stories, its not even mentioned. There are endless stories on how some orange juice drinking politician said some Americans are bitter. I will tell you what is bitter, the taste in my mouth.

It's just bizarre, and exactly what Bush wanted when he put this out with the trash on Friday evening. It seems they had company in the situation room, at least in spirit, the U.S. news media must have been there, giggling along with the rest of them. Incredible.




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UPDATE: Mrs. Robinson correctly points out that ABC News actually broke this story, but you couldn't tell that from their home page!