The myth that "no one dies from US torture, so its not torture...

A simple fact is being overlooked in the Bush-era torture scandal: the number of cases in which detainees have been tortured to death. Abuse did not only involve the high-profile cases of smashing detainees into plywood barriers (“walling”), confinement in coffin-like boxes with insects, sleep deprivation, cold, and waterboarding. To date approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death.

A review of homicide cases, however, shows that few detainee deaths have been properly investigated. Many were not investigated at all. And no official investigation has looked into the connection between detainee deaths and the interrogation policies promulgated by the Bush administration.

Yet an important report by the Senate Armed Services Committee, declassified in April 2009, explains in clear terms how Bush-era interrogation techniques, including torture, once authorized for CIA high-value detainees, were promulgated to Guantánamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where (as reporter Jason Leopold recently noted at The Public Record) the policies have led to homicides.

The killings, at least some of them, have hardly been kept secret. As early as May-June 2003, The New York Times and Washington Post reported on deaths of detainees in Afghanistan. Two detainees at Bagram air base died after extensive beatings by U.S. troops in December 2002—a case reported by The New York Times and that was also the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Another death involved a man beaten to death by a CIA contractor at a base in Asadabad, in eastern Afghanistan, in June 2003.

It's not "just" about torture. It is about murder. How many were murdered by the Bush Regime, and its choice to use enhanced Interrogation/torture to illicit false confessions.

This is not the country I grew up in... Even at the heights of the cold war... we as a nation did not stand around and suggest that the government should have the right to torture and murder people (and US citizens... Jose Pedilla anyone) in order to "keep us safe."

Anybody who apologizes for this.. or doesn't want people held accountable is part of the problem. I want my country back.

And I will not be calm, or rational or sympathetic, or willing to find common ground on this. Motherfuckers tortured people to death AS PART OF THE OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT POLICY. They wrote memos about it. Dick Cheney goes on TV and says that he would waterboard again. Fuck these people. Until motherfuckers are hanging from a gallows pole, I will be complete fucking angry about this. They broke the law. Repeatedly and systemically. They murdered people. they tortured people. People need to go to jail for a long time. If they don't... this is no longer America... this is some cheap ass banna republic... a nation of sheep, ruled by criminals.