Torture, Still U.S. Policy

One standard ploy on the part of American conservatives when arguing about the BushCo military adventures in Iraq has been to ask something like "Well, are you saying that the Iraqi people are not better off now that Saddam Hussein has been removed from power?" The implication was that even though each of the rationalizations that BushCo trotted out to justify their criminal invasion and disastrous war (e.g., the Hussein-al Qaeda connection, WMDs, and so on) proved to be lies, the consequences of their policy had been salutary. After all, the conservatives smirked, we lied to topple a brutal dictator who sanctioned systematic torture of Iraqi civilians.

Well, it turns out that that line of argument, like the earlier conservative and neo-conservative lies, is proving to be less and less persuasive. What the U.S. military did was to unleash an alternative source of brutal, arbitrary power on the Iraqi people. You can find reports here and here in The Guardian. Indeed, the U.S. military has continued to participate in the systematic torture of Iraqi "detainees" by proxy, that is, by allowing the Iraqi police and military to do the torturing for us.

What evidence do we have that the practices detailed in these reports have ceased under the Obama regime? None.