Frank Rich on the 'flagrant embrace of torture'

In his Sunday column in the New York Times, Frank Rich excoriates the Bush Administration's "prewar propaganda blitzkrieg" and it's policies on torture, RAW STORY has learned.
Rich also refers to a recent poll, conducted by The Wall Street Journal and NBC News, which found that since January the number of Americans who find Bush "honest and straightforward" has dipped from 50 percent to 33 percent.

Some excerpts from Sunday's column:

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If it weren't tragic it would be a New Yorker cartoon. The president of the United States, in the final stop of his forlorn Latin America tour last week, told the world, "We do not torture." Even as he spoke, the administration's flagrant embrace of torture was as hard to escape as publicity for Anderson Cooper.

The vice president, not satisfied that the CIA had already been implicated in four detainee deaths, was busy lobbying Congress to give the agency a green light to commit torture in the future. Dana Priest of The Washington Post, having first uncovered secret CIA prisons two years ago, was uncovering new "black sites" in Eastern Europe, where ghost detainees are subjected to unknown interrogation methods redolent of the region's Stalinist past. Before heading south, Bush had been doing his own bit for torture by threatening to cast the first veto of his presidency if Congress didn't scrap a spending bill amendment, written by John McCain and passed, 90-9, by the Senate, banning the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners.

So when you watch the president stand there with a straight face and say, "We do not torture" -- a full year and a half after the first photos from Abu Ghraib -- you have to wonder how we arrived at this ludicrous moment. The answer is not complicated. When people in power get away with telling bigger and bigger lies, they naturally think they can keep getting away with it. And for a long time, Bush and his cronies did. Not anymore.
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