In Panama City, President Bush told the Panamanian press that the U.S. is pursuing terrorists "under the law." He emphatically denied that U.S. forces--including the operators of overseas secret CIA prisons--engage in torture of detainees.
"We do not torture," President Bush stated flatly.
Bush, of course, stands behind VP Cheney in his attempt to exempt the CIA from the proposed Senate ban on torture.
Somehow, all of this must make perfect sense in their heads. Either that, or they're just betting on more collective denial from a dysfunctional country.
We'll be meeting for the intervention in the Oval Office, everybody … don't let on that anything's going on. Be gentle but firm. Step 1 for Bush & Co. is to get them to say the following: "We admit that we are powerless over our addiction to war, and we're really, really making a mess of things."
p.s. "We really do torture people."
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Silja J.A. Talvi, a senior editor at In These Times, is an investigative journalist and essayist with credits in many dozens of newspapers and magazines nationwide, including The Nation, Salon, Santa Fe Reporter, Utne, and the Christian Science Monitor.
