Are you getting the feeling that we are only seeing the memos the Bush admin. wanted us to see?

[NNN0LHI]

I sure am. Who gave permission to abduct and hold the wives and children of Iraqis we were looking for?

We know it was being done.

No low level grunt would have ever done that without some direction from higher ups. Who were those higher ups?

You think Bush and Cheney would have left the real damning evidence laying around for Obama to release?

I call bullshit on this.

Don

[hlthe2b]

1. I certainly think they may have destroyed tons...

But on these torture memos, they certainly did fight very hard to avoid their being released, so.....:shrug:

[rucky]

2. Memos, by definition, get passed around.

so this may have come from a leak.

[Blue Meany]

5. But the "Memo to the File" that is not passed around is

often the most revealing.

[KansDem]

3. You have a point...

I would imagine we will never see the truly heinous crimes of Bush/Cheney. To do so would upset Americans' sense of "morality and virtue."

Like, for example, the tapes Sy Hersh referred to about sodomizing children in order to get their parents to talk...

From DailyKos, 2004--
Seymour Hersh says the US government has videotapes of boys being sodomized at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking," the reporter told an ACLU convention last week. Hersh says there was "a massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there, and higher."

Daily Kos

[HereSince1628]

4. We'll probably never see half of it. But 1/4 of it may be sufficient for convictions.

I think Cheney was deranged enough to keep all the records just like serial killers take trophies from their victims. If we could get into those boxes he was moving when he hurt his back, I think we'd find some of that. What is an old fart with heart disease doing moving boxes filled with paper records? He just couldn't trust anyone to move those.

Surely some stuff is buried deep, and surely some of it was done "off the record."

What is being released is establishing that it was allowed by the highest level.

That makes some of us sick about Bush/Cheney depravity.

But for Cheney admin officials, the evidence is helping to establish the "only doing our jobs as authorized by the president" defense.

[Blue Meany]

6. That's just it. If this is the stuff that was "on the record,"

albeit secretly, I shudder to think of what kinds of things were done with no records being kept. I guess it's a failure of imagination on my part: I just can't think of stuff much worse.

[stillcool]

8. me too..."National Security"

will prevent the most heinous actions from being known. After all, it would put our country in grave danger. Eventually the detainee's stories will come out, at least those that lived through it and aren't brain dead.

[sinkingfeeling]

7. I'm not convinced there isn't a cache of memos that were written to cover their asses if the first

ones ever came to light. I think that's what Cheney is wanting released. The ones that show how effective the torture was in preventing terrorist attacks.

[CoffeeCat]

9. YES! Remember when our Senators/Congress members...

...viewed documents and saw pictures of alleged torture that happened. Seymour Hersh commented on what
was shown, and he said it included the sexual abuse of Iraqi children.

We haven't heard anything about this stuff.

We are hearing about the namby pamby stuff--stress positions, exposure to cold, etc.

Furthermore, and what I think is a really important point---we hear so much about K Mohamed, one of the 9/11 masterminds.
They release information on his torture--because people don't care about what happens to that criminal. It's just so easy
to ignite the torture debate, using a prisoner who everyone loathes. What about the innocent Iraqis and other Muslims
that we plucked off the streets? The average citizens who DID NOTHING WRONG??? What about how those people were treated
and what happened to them?

These memos are important---but what has been released is allowing the neocons to frame the debate. They've created two
camps: Those who don't think that a 9/11 mastermind should be waterboarded and sleep deprived and those who do.

It's totally unfair and a complete twisting of the reality of torture. We've tortured and killed innocent people.

[L. Coyote]

10. No. We got the ones the court ordered released! Send money to the ACLU for that work!

The ACLU delivered this one all gift wrapped and timely as can be.
They have been working on this for a good while, or likely we would not be reading about it AT ALL!

It was not Obama, it was the ACLU!!! Obama was following a court order!