The Torture President Attempts Comedy, Jokes About Punishment for War Crimes

"Welcome to my hanging," Bush said, drawing laughs from the well-dressed audience in The Union League's ornate hall.

Har, har, har.

It's funny because he's a war criminal. Get it?

Between an illegal war of aggression ginned up with false "intelligence" he knew to be false and the normalization of torture as national policy, that Bush sure is funny with those crazy war crimes!

The low-level grunts who committed torture and abuses at Abu Ghraib were tried, convicted, demonized and many went to prison. As they should have. The Nuremburg trials established that "just following orders" is not an excuse for such things. But these kids got scapegoated so Bush could go free and make jokes about it. Bush and Rumsfeld and everyone in command responsibility who authorized, approved or allowed that torture program to continue and then tried to scapegoat a bunch of soldiers on the night shift should be there, too. And now we have confirmation from Congress:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.

That sure sounds a lot like what Seymour Hersh was saying in 2004, back when the war criminals were issuing their whitewash reports saying it was all the fault of a few bad apples:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.