Cheney's America

Glenn Greenwald provides links to and comments on Jose Padillo's description of being held in a Navy brig without access to counsel and tortured for three and a half years. An American citizen.

Just read it: The Bush administration's torture of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla 10/10/06.

As Greenwald points out, Padilla's testimony is consistent with the kinds of torture being used elsewhere in the Bush Gulag that have been documented by multiple witnesses, pictures and videos.

Today at his press conference, where his syntax in general seemed a bit more challenged than usual, Bush lied about the torture legalization bill and the illegal wiretapping bill this way:

There have been some votes on the floor of the Senate and the House that make it abundantly clear we just have a different view of the world. The vast majority of Democrats voted against a program that would enable us to interrogate high-value detainees. That was the vote. It's wide open for everybody to see: Should a CIA program go forward, or not go forward. The vast majority of Democrats in the House voted against a program that would have institutionalized the capacity of this government to listen to al Qaeda phone calls or al Qaeda affiliate phone calls coming from outside the country to inside the country.

It's very important for our fellow citizens to recognize that I don't question anybody's patriotism, but I do question a strategy that says we can't give those on the front line of fighting terror the tools necessary to fight terror. I believe that in order to defend America we must take a threat seriously and defeat an enemy overseas so we don't have to face them here. I don't believe we can wait to respond after attack has occurred.

Translation: if you don't vote for Republicans so we can keep subjecting alleged terrorism suspects to mock executions by partial drowning, sensory deprivation, sadistic physical restraints and all the rest of the Cheney-Bush torture menu, The Terrorists will come get you.

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