Groucho Marxs; "Who are you going to believe? Me or your own eyes?"

With all the evidence already out there about the criminal acts of this administration how can anyone with that isn't as brain-dead as Terri Shaivo believe that "we don't torture"?

McCain said it right; "It's not about them, it's about us."

How can we possibly claim to defend the "rule of law" when we violate the very essence of it?

I question whether anyone will ever be held accountable for this and there is some logic as to why the Bush administration has slid down the slippery slope of ethics and morality.

The Cheney cabal sees itself as Dirty Harry doing the things that need to be done to get the streets cleaned up while fending off the Chief who wants do things by the book. I think it is a matter of those in power who see this war on terror as a need by America to operate outside the "polite" rules of war. They see this war as a matter of extermination, therefore it is necessary to operate with a mentality that ignores human rights, international law and Christian law and government accountablity to the American public.

Laws and conventions are only weights that prevent us from eradicating terrorists to them. It is perfectly justifiable then to use every means at your disposal that leads to the eradication of terrorists, including torture.

These type of actions are those of an administration that is aggressive and paranoid. There is a certain amount of martyr complex that goes with this and why this administration is going to continue the course because the "freedom" of all Americans will be determined by the tough actions of this cabal despite the critics who want to hamstring their operations.

This is old American justice and a sophmoric view of the world. This is the world that makes it allright for Batman to hold a criminal out of a skyscraper window in order to get information that feeds his war on crime. Same thing for the Cheney cabal and this administration. Instead of honesty, they lie to the American public about this "dark side" of the war on terror. Hence this moral slippery slope that this administration has sunk into and the current quandry of what to say about the action that it has taken.

What they would say if talking straight to the American public would be something like this, "We found out about plans for a dirty bomb from this prisoner, however we had to beat him for 48 straight hours." Hypothetically, what if the information they got was true and beating this prisoner saved 1000's of American lives, would it be worth it? That should be the debate we have about this scandal and what makes this administration paranoid charlatans is that instead of this we get murky evasions and outright lies.

<<Your present government is the pits and in Europe we fail to understand your hero worship of the president - for god's sake he is only a man - so was Hitler and look where that got us.>>

Bushitler has been IMPOSED on the United States populace by a virulent thuggish minority who rigged the voting system to score a 'win' and hijack our government. I should add, WITH the permission of the media companies and corporations who are primarily conservative owned.

Hero worship? Maybe 30% of the population think Bush is a hero.

Ultimately no nation can impose its will on the rest of the planet forever, many try though and unfortunately our country is currently the Beast, sacrificing itself even as it tries to corral the remainder of the planet into its influence.

So the CIA is Bush's secret police. All people in "The Party" are untouchable. We're passing laws restricting rights to scapegoated groups in this country. There are countless cases of bannings, if not burnings, of oppositional information in all media. I think Dick Durbin is right on the mark in invoking Hitler's infamy when referring to this administration.

It's clear that this administration is corrupt, operationally and morally. The involvement bleeds into all branches of government, so our so-called "representatives" will do nothing unless we demand change. Do we just sit in fear and click internet poll buttons for three years? Allow a handful of martyrs stand up and be marginalized, if not arrested, for our sins? Do nothing as thousands of people are disappearing? That's hardly better than what the German people did under Hitler.

If we don't all show up, in person, on the steps of the Congress and demand impeachment and removal of all the leadership - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and all their henchmen - on the issue of torture, we have not learned the lessons of history.

I think that torture is the one cross-party issue that will get everyone out of their seats and on the bus. A million-man/mom march with signs and speeches is nice, but thousands of people in the halls of congressional offices demanding to be heard is better. Who knew in the 60's that the experience of taking over the college administration building could be valuable in saving the country 40 years later? Yes, it's come to that.

Bottom line - we ARE there. Lets don't wait for the concentration camps.

People might wonder -- how did America come to this place? The obvious answer that we read in Salon is -- Bush got elected. That's what caused it all. Get rid of Bush and it will all stop.

I have a different point of view. Let me tell you about a panel discussion on torture held by the National Academy of Sciences in Washington that I had the honor to attend roughly ten years ago, when my husband was inducted into that stellar organization.

There was one expert who worked with Tibetan refugees who talked about the lasting effects of torture on the individual. There was another expert who worked with survivors of Serbian rape camps who told us that torture survivors don't need medication or therapy so much as they need their lives to be given back to them through social and political change.

The last expert shocked me. He was an American doctor who used to work in our American prison system. He talked about how drug addicts get tortured by guards in prison through the denial of health care. He named the War on Drugs as the breeding ground for torture in America. Throwing huge numbers of sick, weak, nonviolent people into the prison system has created conditions tantamount to torture.

I was much more impressed by the Tibetan and Bosnian stories so I kinda blocked the American guy out of my mind. I didn't really take him seriously.

But then a friend of mine was convicted for running a medical marijuana cub in Orange County. Despite the fact that he gave the pot away free and only charged people a nominal $20 membership fee, he was considered by the jury to be a drug dealer rather than someone fulfilling the mandate of California's medical marijuana law, and he was sent to prison for six years.

He suffers from spinal arthritis and has to wear a brace. On a good day, pot is enough to relieve his pain. On a bad day it takes a little more. Without pot, he needs bottles and bottles of opiates, because his spine is collapsing on itself, and that tends to hurt a lot.

When he went to prison to serve his time, they took away his back brace as a security threat. The only pain relief they offered was a few Tylenol every week. Not even every day. That's what constitutes pain relief in our prison system.

His treatment constituted torture. He lived in horrific pain every single day. Finallly his medical problems became so severe, he was confined to the prison hospital.

Luckily, Gray "Property of the Prison Guard Union" Davis, a pro-torture Democrat, was overthrown. A few months after Arnold announced his controversial plans to reform the California prison system, my friend was granted an early parole.

I hope some people out there can see from my anecdotes that we're not going to get rid of torture just by getting rid of Bush.

What the torture experts at the NAS panel agreed on is people who commit torture are able to do so by a process of desensitization. I think the War on Drugs has desensitized the American public to torture. In my personal opinion, the War on Drugs has given us a thirty year dress rehearsal for the Bush administration's abuses overseas.

We could have opted out at any time, but we didn't. This is who we are. If we want to stop being these people, we have to start working on ourselves and -- as tempting as it may be given the shocking excesses of the current administration -- not just blame it all on our leaders.