Tim Rutten from the Los Angeles Times writes that Apart from understanding how and why the Bush/Cheney administration tricked the American people into going to war in Iraq, no question is more urgent than how the White House forced the adoption of torture as state policy of the United States.

An investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, now partly concluded, already has gone a long way toward explaining the decision to place the United States among the world’s pariah states. In a statement delivered Tuesday, committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said: “Some have suggested that detainee abuses committed by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantanamo were the result of a ‘few bad apples’ acting on their own. It would be a lot easier to accept if that were true.” In fact, Levin said, senior U.S. officials “sought out information on aggressive [interrogation] techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees.”

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History will record the abuses of this administration in it’s own time and way. In the meantime, Mr. Rutten is right. let our time tested poltical processes play themselves out, and eventually the wrongs will be righted. That is the great thing about our country. We eventually get it and make things right.

But here is what can happen when you live in a country without oversight. Too bad it’s the US administration in charge…

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