One of the reasons why I’m blogging less about politics these days is that I feel an overwhelming sense of my own uselessness. Nothing I say is going to make BushCo actually have to pay the price for the various outrages they’ve pereptrated.
Take the torture issue, for example. It will be no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, but the NY Times is runing an article today showing that, in fact, Abu Ghirab was not an isolated case of a few rogue soliders, but rather part of a broad pattern of abusive behavior that began at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and spread from there. The FBI knew what was going on, and at least some cases was none to happy about it. But they were unable to have an impact on the process.
When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last spring, officials characterized the abuse as the aberrant acts of a small group of low-ranking reservists, limited to a few weeks in late 2003. But thousands of pages in military reports and documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to the American Civil Liberties Union in the past few months have demonstrated that the abuse involved multiple service branches in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba, beginning in 2002 and continuing after Congress and the military had begun investigating Abu Ghraib.
For example:
In late 2002, more than a year before a whistle-blower slipped military investigators the graphic photographs that would set off the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, an F.B.I. agent at the American detention center in Guant