This is an important story from Katha Pollitt at The Nation in 2009. She followed the story of those who were so influential in getting our country involved in the use of torture.
She mentions their names and the lives they now live. They appeared then and now to have suffered no negative effects.
John Yoo says it was worth it.
John YooAnd then there was Rummy.. In 2002, while working for the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Yoo wrote a crucial memo saying that terror suspects weren't covered by US commitments to treaties and agreements banning torture. Now Yoo is a tenured professor of law at Berkeley. Eat your heart out, Ward Churchill! And he isn't hiding away in his office, either. This semester Yoo's a visiting prof at Chapman University School of Law, where he spoke at a public forum and defended torture as necessary to protect the country. "Was it worth it?" he asked, according to the Los Angeles Times. For John Yoo, definitely.
Donald RumsfeldMore:. The former secretary of defense, who famously encouraged interrogators to force prisoners to stand for long periods of time ("I stand for eight or ten hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?"), got a one-year appointment in 2007 to the Hoover Institution at Stanford. In his announcement Hoover's director, John Raisian, said "Don" would "pursue new insights on the direction of thinking that the United States might consider going forward." Or maybe might not consider...
Dick CheneyAnd of course Paul Wolfowitz.. As the only Republican able to project a sense of personal dignity, the King of the Dark Side is having the time of his life, writing his memoirs by day and bashing Obama on Fox by night. Lunches with visiting pooh-bahs, speeches and fishing trips are also on the calendar.
Paul WolfowitzAndrew Sullivan blamed Rumsfeld for the involvement of medical personnel in the torture programs.. The former deputy defense secretary was keen on harsher methods of interrogation to extract more "intelligence" from detainees in the run-up to the Iraq War. Today Wolfowitz runs the US-Taiwan Business Council, which sounds rather lucrative, and is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, along with John Yoo, Lynne Cheney, Charles Murray, Newt Gingrich and similar. Can't somebody give Ayaan Hirsi Ali a job and get her out of there?
How Doctors Got Into the Torture Business
Soldiers are trained to kill and doctors to heal. At least that's how we usually understand those two professions. But wars can often distort reality, and the war on terrorism has turned into a test case. An inspiring example is that of Colonel Kelly Faucette, M.D. He recently wrote about caring for a new patient at the intensive-care unit of the 47th Combat Support Hospital in Mosul, Iraq. The patient was a terrorist insurgent, a man who planted hidden roadside bombs to murder civilians and Faucette's fellow soldiers. Faucette wrote in his local paper: "Something inside me wants to walk up to this guy ... and just clobber him." But Faucette didn't. Instead he healed him before sending him to a jail, and by that act of healing he helped heal Iraq.The documents may be public now, but there is no denying we already knew.That's the America I know and love. But it is not, alas, the only face of America in this war. One of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's first instructions for military interrogations outside the Geneva Conventions was that military doctors should be involved in monitoring torture. It was a fateful decision — and we learn much more about its consequences in a new book based on 35,000 pages of government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The book is called Oath Betrayed (to be published June 27) by medical ethicist Dr. Stephen Miles, and it is a harrowing documentation of how the military medical profession has been corrupted by the Bush-Rumsfeld interrogation rules.