Torture, Lies and Videotape
While I, like Mike, think that Americans have always accepted the ticking time bomb rationale for torture and am not particularly surprised by the fact we’ve thrown out the Geneva Conventions and our own domestic laws against torture, it’s still a bad jolting to know that the CIA destroyed subpoenaed evidence in a criminal trial. I always hope that the next revelation of the Bush’s administration lawlessness — the torture memos, secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, warrantless wiretapping — will be the one which causes Congress and Courts to finally push back. I’ve been disappointed every time. Perhaps this will the revelation. While the act of destroying tapes is, in a sense, not as bad as the actual sanctioned torture, the case that the CIA was breaking the law seems to be an order of magnitude more clear than previous cases. There was a federal criminal trial, the court subpoenaed evidence, the CIA first lied about the existence of said evidence and then destroyed it. Even Ed Morrissey of Captain’s Quarter’s thinks this was a step too far.
