I’m ashamed of Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.

Ashamed that they are not prosecuting torture by CIA personnel, and even more ashamed that they are not prosecuting the higher ups who authorized it.

The memos just released on Thursday provide prima facie evidence that the following Bush lawyers committed war crimes: Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury.
Alberto Gonzales, by signing off on these memos, also implicated himself. By extension, Bush and Cheney did, too. As did Rumsfeld, who wrote a memo of his own authorizing some of the same techniques.

Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code, Section 2441, says that someone is guilty of a war crime if he or she commits torture or conspires to commit torture.

It then defines torture as “an act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.”

The Bush lawyers, as we now learn, greenlighted waterboarding, which we prosecuted Japanese soldiers for in World War II.

They greenlighted “walling,” which is now a sick verb, I guess, meaning to bash someone’s head against a wall.

They greenlighted sensory deprivation, the dousing of inmates with very cold water, and the placing of an inmate in grotesque narrow confinement.

And they even greenlighted the sending of insects into cells.

The Bush lawyers excused it all by saying that none of these acts would inflict severe pain or suffering, but no one in their right mind would come to that conclusion.

Only those of a sick mind.

And there’s one other thing: It’s also a war crime to inflict “cruel or inhuman treatment” that falls short of torture.

How can the Bush lawyers get around that one? They can’t.

But Obama and Holder are letting them.

And that’s unforgivable.