I pledge allegiance to… torture.
“The architects of this network of secret prisons and secret torture were a small but powerful group within the Bush administration. Dick Cheney stood at the center of the effort but delegated many of its operations to others.
“The vice president’s counsel (and later chief of staff), David Addington, was a ruthless, bullying enforcer of the strategy, effectively derailing all challenges by claiming that everything had been mandated by the president and by dismissing all legal and moral challenges as naïve and weak.
“John Yoo, a law professor from the University of California, Berkeley, who worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, drafted an infamous memo giving legal cover to torture by simply redefining what torture was — virtually anything short of deliberate killing. George Tenet, the eager-to-please C.I.A. director; William Haynes, the militant general counsel to the Pentagon; Alberto Gonzales, the weak and pliable White House counsel who later became attorney general: all played vital roles in the creation and protection of these covert strategies.”
“There is no happy ending to this sordid and shameful story. – Jane Mayer
Within hours of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Cheney in effect took command…NYTimes