Into the abyss we go.

So things are looking really bad for the former heads of the Bush administration right now. Bad isn't even a good word, rather ghastly or some other synonym that sounds horrifyingly worse than bad. I stress this because by now everybody should know that Obama recently made public the restricted CIA reports which detailed the Bush administration’s part in the torturing of “enemy combatants”. Now, the CIA report basically proves that there were high ranking officials within the Bush White House, like the abominable Vice President Dick Cheney, who sanctioned the use of various torture techniques. Most notably in this Tom Clancy novel gone wrong was a memo written in 2002 by then assistant Attorney General Frank Bybee. In his memo, Bybee not only brazenly sanctioned CIA operatives’ usage of “cruel, inhumane, and degrading” interrogation techniques, but also suggested that operatives could justify the severity of their interrogations by stating that the procedures were done out of “necessity or self-defense”.

            But the worst news from this spiraling black hole of lawlessness came with the release of the Senate Armed Service Committee’s (SASC) report on Tuesday. Beginning in December of 2001, the SASC’s report chronicles the interrogation tactics at such storied military prisons as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Among the reports most shocking facts is that military interrogators were instructed to take on interrogations techniques used in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program. This program was initially developed by the military as a way to train personnel, military contractors, and Department of Defense workers whose job responsibilities place them in high risk of being captured behind enemy lines is high. In the program, students are taught how to evade capture, survive in hostile wilderness situations, resist torture, and how to escape imprisonment. So, what do the heads of the Bush administration do with the SERE program? Well the geniuses at the helm of our nation in late 2001 took this program’s lessons on how to resist torture and “reversed engineered” them in order to develop better interrogations methods. But the messed up thing about the government’s reverse engineering of SERE is that the program’s torture resistance training was based mainly off of America’s experiences in the Korean War. Why is this important? Well during the Korean War American combatants were tortured by their North Korean captors in a manner which didn’t look to foster vital information. Rather, the torture techniques used by North Korea were implemented to acquire false information that was later used in propaganda for the North Korean war effort. American POWs were featured on film renouncing America and making assertions that were unfounded. So, in knowing this, our government based its torture program off of techniques created to purposely acquire false information. Insane doesn’t even define how ridiculous that is. And to top it off, our government not only spread these tactics to all of the branches of the armed force and intelligence agencies, but they did so before we even had “enemy combatants” in prison. But what’s really fucked up is that these interrogation techniques didn’t work and they were used as a recruiting tool by Islamic extremist. Doesn’t this sound like our government had this shit plotted out a little too far ahead of time? Doesn’t this sound like our government meshed the plot lines of V for Vendetta, The Manchurian Candidate, and 1984 together and came up with one of the most devastatingly intricate plot lines of all time?Unfortunately, this is real life and people were really brutally tortured and even murder in this tale of power run amok