It's not Abuse, it's Torture

Dahlia Lithwick and Phillippe Sands of Slate argue that Susan J. Crawford's explicit use of the word "torture" this week "changes everything". Put simply, the Bush administration has long asserted that a combination of coercive techniques it approved in the wake of 9/11 are legal. Of course, that's because the administration relied on its own lawyers to redefine precisely what torture is. For example, many of the techniques that our military and CIA interrogators have used over the past 7 years mirror those of their former ideological foes, the Red Army and the KGB. Lithwick and Sands state that Crawford's acknowledgement of our activities as torture is "astounding". "She has repudiated the formalistic (and perennially shifting) definitions of torture as whatever-it-is-we-don't-do. She has admitted that there is a medical and legal definition for torture and also that we have crossed the line into it." Who is this Susan J. Crawford? None other than the former "general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration."