How Bush and Cheney Used a Stasi School for Torture

Unlike the United States, some democracies take the international and domestic rule of law seriously. That's especially true of countries that once suffered under totalitarianism of various sorts, like communism in Poland. And so we are beginning to see glimmers of legal accountability from Europe for the war crimes perpetrated by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The EU long ago reported the existence of torture sites in Poland and Romania, and one of the EU investigators of these war crimes was former Solidarity member, Józef Pinior. He insists he saw something important:

Pinior has always claimed that, during his investigations, he was told about a document signed by Leszek Miller, Poland’s Prime Minister at the time the CIA prison was in operation, providing information regulating the operations of the prison – in a military intelligence training base in Stare Kiejkuty in north eastern Poland – including information about how, if necessary, to deal with corpses inside the facility.

My italics (but this isn't the only formal recognition of deaths in the torture archipelago). We know, because even the Pentagon has confirmed, that several prisoners held under the Bush-Cheney administration were tortured to death. That those running the program knew that the techniques were brutal enough to risk occasional deaths of the victims adds one extra layer of criminality and evil to the process.

Isn't there something grotesquely appropriate in that Bush and Cheney, in importing into the US the torture techniques of totalitarian regimes, used one building named in honor of the founder of the East German Stasi? They remain war criminals, and the rule of law in America remains unenforced by the Obama administration on the core issue of torture. But not all politicians are as craven as Obama on this.

What do you guys think?


R.C.
Remember to seriously read my signature down below and be sure you understand what I mean by it...