The Bush Regime has demonstrated that

it sees no value in truth or dignity

And just to add another gem to the festering pile,

The New York Times reported Wednesday

that the Justice Department has been

authorizing torture for more than two years

We have been quickly sliding down

a slippery moral slope since the war began

Every time Bush lies, every time the military sacrifices

our dignity as a just and compassionate civilized nation

for the purpose of delaying our inevitable defeat,

they become a little bit more like

the people against whom Bush crusades

The administration uses moral righteousness

and justice as its soapbox for advocating this war

But, somehow, in furthering our causes,

it has slowly conceded these very principles

This Repugnant President

It's perhaps worth reminding some readers that my first response to reports of abuse and torture at Gitmo was to accuse the accusers of exaggeration or deliberate deception.

I simply didn't believe America would do those things. I'd also endorsed Bush in 2000, believed it necessary to give the president the benefit of the doubt in wartime, and knew Rumsfeld as a friend.

It struck me as a no-brainer that this stuff was being invented by the far-left or was part of al Qaeda propaganda. After all, they train captives to lie about this stuff.

Bottom line: I trusted this president in a time of war to obey the rule of law that we were and are defending. And then I was forced to confront the evidence.

He betrayed all of us. He lied. He authorized torture in secret, and then, when busted after Abu Ghraib, blamed it on low-level grunts. This was not a mistake. It was a betrayal.

War Criminal

You must read the full investigative piece in the NYT yesterday on how this administration decided on breaking America's historic ban on torture and then pursued a long, corrupting policy of ensuring that the interpretation of the law was politicized to keep torture alive.

I am increasingly certain that when the history of the Bush Administration is written, this systematic violation of statutory and treaty-based law concerning fundamental war crimes and other horrific offenses will be seen as the blackest mark in our nation's recent history.

Not only because of what was done, but because the programs were routinely sanctioned, on an ongoing basis, by numerous esteemed professionals -- lawyers, doctors, psychologists and government officers -- without whose approval such a systematized torture regime could not be sustained.

The way in which conservative lawyers, and conservative intellectuals, and conservative journalists aided and abetted these war crimes.

The way in which the president of the United States revealed so much contempt for the law that he put a candidate to run the Office of Legal Counsel on probation before he appointed him in order to keep the torture regime in place.

The way in which Republicans and Democrats in the Congress pathetically refused to stand up to these violations of American honor and decency in any serious way (and, I'm sorry, Senator McCain, but in the end, you caved, as you always do lately).

These will go down in history as some of the most shameful decisions these people ever made. Perhaps a sudden, panicked decision by the president to use torture after 9/11 is understandable if unforgivable.

But the relentless, sustained attempt to make torture permanent part of the war-powers of the president, even to the point of abusing the law beyond recognition, removes any benefit of the doubt from these people. And they did it all in secret - and lied about it when Abu Ghraib emerged.

They upended two centuries of American humane detention and interrogation practices without even letting us know.

And the decision to allow one man - the decider - to pre-empt and knowingly distort the rule of law in order to detain and torture anyone he wants - is a function not of conservatism, but of fascism.

There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes.

We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power.

We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes.

The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?