Multiple Choice Question

What item has the least chance of survival right now?
a - a chicken with a cough in China
b - a Peugeot parked outdoors in a Paris suburb
c - a lawyer on Saddam's defense team
d - Credibility in the Bush White House.
No matter how loudly Bush may scream that "We do not torture", no one believes it. It's about as believable as Nixon saying he's "not a crook" or Winnie the Pooh saying he wasn't going to eat that jar of honey but was "just going to taste it." Why can't anyone in this administration tell the truth about anything?! Look, just admit that some of these terrorists are vicious, indiscriminate murderers of innocents and are not derserving of the protections of the Geneva Convention, and the neocons want to let the CIA use torture tactics to extract info on future attacks. I think many people would be OK with this, as targeting people who behead innocent people on videotape for their own warped political/religious reasons just might be deserving of being tortured. But they'll never do this, because then they would have to admit that only a handful of terrorists fall into this category and they would have to separate them from the poor captured slobs who happen to be Saddam's driver and the like. It's much easier to lump them all together, build secret prisons and let the interrogators do their worst. When you direct your Attorney General to find loopholes in the Geneva Convention, when you put someone like Rumsfeld in charge of defining the rules of interrogation, when you insist on the CIA being excluded from any law forbidding torture of prisoners, when you continue to hide pictures of prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib, when you build secret "black site" CIA prisons throughout Eastern Europe and Asia, you can't expect anyone to believe your claims that torture is not being done. And who will pay for these excesses? Pity any American prisoner taken in the next 20 years for it will be at least that long before the reputation of the US can be restored.