The truth will out

It's all coming out now.

TimesOnline is reporting:

Prison guards jailed for abusing inmates at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq are planning to appeal against their convictions on the ground that recently released CIA torture memos prove that they were scapegoats for the Bush Administration. . . . [T]he previous administration, from President Bush down, blamed the incident on a few low-ranking “bad apples” who were acting on their own.

Mr Gittins [one of the defense lawyers] said the refusal by the Bush Administration to acknowledge that it had authorized such techniques during the trials of the prison guards — and the judges’ refusal to call senior administration officials to testify — undermined their defenses.

And one person commenting on the blog made this astute point:

If waterboarding etc was NOT torture, then why did the administration need to blame 'a few bad apples' for these acts when they could have announced AT THE TIME the acts were not torture? Because they KNEW really that they WERE torture, and that the legal arguments presented was their sham coverup.

That's the trouble with lying. You get so tangled up in your own web of deceit that you inevitably trip yourself up.

We now know that the torture memos were designed to give cover -- but only to the higher ups who authorized it and to the agents who carried out the prescribed interrogations. When it came to providing cover for the lowly guards who were simply given the task of "roughing up" the prisoners to get them ready for the interrogators -- those same higher ups pulled up the drawbridge and used them as scapegoats.

We now know that the bad apples were at the very top of the tree.

Ralph