Amnesty releases a report into detention and torture in Iraq. The human rights organisation rightly questions the moral and legal authority to hold thousands of people without trial (14,000 in all.) The UK and US are, once again, implicated in war crimes. The Bush administration may be trying to hunt down individuals who leak supposedly classified information to journalists, but perhaps they should worry about their own practices.
I finally read Jane Meyer’s stunning, recent expose in the New Yorker on the Bush administration’s deliberate plans to torture prisoners across the world. She follows conservative Alberto J. Mora, a former Navy general counsel, in his fight against the moral and legal corruption at the heart of the current regime. The article proves, once again, that torture wasn’t accidental or committed by a handful of rogue elements. It was a targeted and systematic ideology from the top echelons of the government.