I do fault Obama for not calling that s.o.b. out as soon as he took office. What was the promised "change" supposed to be about, if not that?

And Cheney too has reared his foul head and is spouting his hateful stream of filth.

And the media seek them out, and give considerable importance to their verbal excrescences.

In fact, their point of view is dominating. Torture is patriotic. Those CIA boys are patriots doing what is necessary to protect us.
That is the prevailing narrative.

And on the other side, that what the CIA did in our name is an abomination - that voice has no one to speak it here. In the UN, yes. Internationally, yes. But here, no.

Obama is "troubled". That's about it. Very brave.
Hillary, if she said anything, I haven't heard about it.
Kerry, who is making noises that suggest he might try again in 2016 has, typically, nothing to say. Yeah. He can't. OK. But if he could, he wouldn't.

"Torture is categorically prohibited by law throughout the US. Every act constituting torture under the Convention constitutes a criminal offense under the law of the US."

"No official of the government (federal, state, local, civilian, military) is authorized to commit or instruct anyone else to commit torture.  Nor may any official condone or tolerate torture in any form.  No exceptional circumstances may be invoked as a justification for torture. US law contains no provision permitting inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment to be employed on grounds of exigent circumstances, for example during a state of public emergency."

Under article VI,cl.2, of the US Constitution duly ratified treaties become part of the "Supreme Law of the Land," equivalent in legal stature to enacted federal statutes (and the issue is federalized if it touches state or local governments.)

"Torture has alwasy been proscribed by the eight Amendment which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment."  (note: in 1994, USC 2340 includes acts outside of US territory, and adopts Convention definitions of torture.)

In the "Salt Pit," a then-secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, John "Bruce" Jessen watched carefully in late 2002 as five agency officers rushed into a darkened cell and grabbed an Afghan detainee named Gul Rahman..

"It was thoroughly planned and rehearsed," Jessen later explained, according to a CIA investigator's report. "They dragged him outside, cut off his clothes and secured him with Mylar tape," before beating him and forcing him to run wearing a hood. When he fell, they dragged him down dirt passageways, leaving abrasions up and down his body.

Jessen added a critique. "After something like this is done, interrogators should speak to the prisoner to give [him] something to think about," he told the investigator.

On Nov. 20, 2002, Rahman was found dead in his unheated cell. He was naked from the waist down and had been chained to a concrete floor. An autopsy concluded that he probably froze to death.

More pointedly, when journalists write about torture and depredations of current or former regimes, journalists don't feel the need to get the torturers' side of the story. No one is rushing to ask Assad's torturers in Syria if their tactics are necessary to keep "terrorists" in check. No one is asking North Korean guards if their treatment of their people is OK because some other country is worse. No one rushes to counterbalance the accounts of Holocaust victims with the justifications of Nazi guards. It simply isn't done, any more than we "balance" stories of child sexual abuse with a hot-take counterpoint from a member of NAMBLA. The reason we don't provide "balance" in these cases is that to do so would be to normalize those behaviors as part of legitimate discourse.

So why in the world are the torturers who subjected innocent people to anal feedings and dungeon ceiling hangings given the courtesy of "balance" in the press? Where is the line that separates issues that require balance from those that do not?

In a decent moral universe, torturers don't get the benefit of explaining themselves to the press any more than serial killers do, except potentially out of morbid curiosity.

How refreshing would it have been had the media not had their usual Pavlovian response and just said, "No, sorry - we're not bringing Dick Cheney on here and giving him another opportunity to talk about why it was good that we tortured people."

Who was in bed with that den of thieves Enron..

The American term "enhanced interrogation" closely mirrors the Gestapo's term "sharpened interrogation", whose rules were spelled out by its chief, Heinrich Müller, in an infamous directive in 1942. Permitted Gestapo techniques included a starvation diet, sleep deprivation, dark cells and exhaustion, with beatings only allowed in the presence of a doctor.

- Paul Mason, The Guardian

"Those who carry out the penalty tend to become an autonomous sector; justice is relieved of responsibility for it by a bureaucratic concealment of the penalty itself," wrote sociologist Michel Foucault, a quarter of a century before Abu Ghraib.