Speaking of the torture memos

We weren't? Well, we are now.

This memo was crafted by Jay Bybee, a long-time Bush Family factotum who originally served as White House aide to George Bush Senior. There, Bybee played a key role in quashing the investigation into BNL, the shady bank used by George I to send millions of secret dollars to Saddam Hussein for weapons purchases, including WMD materials supplied by Bush-backed arms merchants. When the scandal broke, Bush I appointed lawyers from these same arms dealers to top Justice Department posts, where they supervised the "investigation" into their former companies. Meanwhile, Bybee pressured local prosecutors to restrict their probe of the bank's dirty dealings to -- you guessed it -- a few low-ranking "bad apples." Once again, Bush skirts were kept clean -- while Bush blood money kept flowing to Saddam. For his faithful family services, Bybee, like Chertoff, was made a federal judge by Bush II.

The Bush-Bybee torture authorization was in force until January 2005, when it was ostentatiously replaced by a somewhat broader definition of torture just before Gonzales' confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate. But another Bybee-penned memo, detailing specific, Bush-approved "coercive methods," remains classified. Is it still in force? Nobody knows.

In any event, the Bushists' PR shuffle on torture is meaningless. Gonzales has already declared to the Senate that interrogators in the CIA's secret gulag aren't bound by the new "restrictions" anyway. What's more, he's also asserted -- again openly, to the Senate -- that Bush has the right to break any law or restriction he pleases "while acting in his capacity as commander-in-chief." Thus whatever the Leader orders -- even torture and murder -- cannot be a crime.

This is no hypothetical case, as Gonzales pretended to the Senate. In a series of executive orders beginning in October 2001, Bush has declared his peremptory right to capture, imprison, indefinitely detain or even assassinate anyone in the world whom he arbitrarily and secretly designates an "enemy" -- without any legal process at all, the Washington Post reports. Thousands of such "enemies" have been plunged into the CIA's unrestricted prisons, The Guardian reports; and as Bush himself bragged in his 2003 State of the Union speech, "many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem." They were simply killed, in secret, at Bush's order.

This is thug law, a death-cult of blood and domination -- the true religion of the Bushists and their mirror-image crimelords in al-Qaida.
  Information Clearinghouse article

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.