Republicans go apeshit over the concept of accountability for torture

Now that things might actually be going somewhere in the prosecution of the thugs who legalized torture (under the guise of "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques") with Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement that a "preliminary review" will be conducted to examine the general lines of what happened to those detainees with all that waterboarding and such, you can reasonably expect Republicans to go simply ballistic as they try so very hard to stifle the truth, ignore justice and escape accountability.

Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Kit Bond (R-Mo.) called the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate whether CIA operatives broke the law when they used harsh interrogation tactics a “witch hunt targeting the terror fighters who have kept us safe since 9/11.”

“With a criminal investigation hanging over the agency’s head, every CIA terror fighter will be in [cover your ass] mode,” Bond continued.

Except that the CIA has always been in "cover-your-ass mode" from the very beginning of this affair, since the days of the Bush administration when torture was essentially legalized thanks to cowardly loopholes.

It's nice to see him compare this to a "witch hunt", though. Can't have people who actually broke the law and committed torture actually face justice, can he? These crooks did most certainly not "keep us safe"; they didn't do shit. They were thugs and nothing more, thugs who clearly enjoyed the suffering they were inflicting upon those inmates and who knew full well (unless they were too damned stupid to realize it) that torture simply doesn't work outside the realms of 24.

Calling these "interrogators" (or rather, "torturers") people who "kept us safe" is the equivalent to saying Saddam Hussein was a freedom fighter. They did nothing of the sort, and cased far more damage than good.

(via Dispatches from the Culture Wars)

Technorati tags: politics · republicans · torture · enhanced interrogation techniques