Bushistas Go Shopping For Torture Technique

Inquisition or Khmer Rouge?

"Consumers are often faced with difficult choices between product styles in today's diverse market. There is Chicago vs. New York style pizza. Memphis vs. Texas style barbecue. Swedish vs. Japanese style massages. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the Bush administration decided to get into the torture business, it had to shop around.

This shopper's dilemma of choices was evident in the twisted testimony given this month by Steven Bradbury, the acting chief of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and one of the central figures in the Bush torture controversy. While it received relatively little attention, Bradbury not only acknowledged a formal program of waterboarding, he also casually distinguished President Bush's approach from historical models such as waterboarding by the Spanish Inquisition. Though Bradbury insisted that the "only thing in common is, I think, the use of water," he omitted that other common denominator: pain. Indeed, the primary difference appears to be that the administration rejected water ingestion rather than water saturation to cause the pain. It turns out that the administration thought seriously about its own style of waterboarding and opted for a Khmer Rouge style over the Spanish style."