More torture

Salon just ran an interview with Leila Sadat, a commissioner on the United States Commission for International Religious Freedom during the Clinton administration, about the Red Cross report on Guantánamo Bay. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's torture.

Maybe I'm being naive, but I am surprised that they were using torture at Guantánamo.
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It's torture. A lot of these techniques have been looked at in other countries; there's been a lot of litigation about them. They seem pretty clearly to be prohibited by the torture convention and I suppose even those that don’t amount to torture would nonetheless qualify as cruel or inhuman or degrading treatment, and that is also a legal definition.

Which tells us that the use of torture isn't just a few low-ranking folks at Abu Graib, it's systemic. Not that I didn't already know that.

It's long past time that the President, in his rôle as commander-in chief, took responsibility for rooting this out. But that's hardly likely, given how he just promoted Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel who wrote the infamous torture memo, to Attorney General of the United States.

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Update: Orcinus has more on Gonzales as a bellweather domestically.