American mediocrity - torture and history

A stunning assessment of the ahistoric nature of the torture permitted by the US the past 7 years is here:
In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use

This entire article is stomach-turning, but the worst aspect has to be the picture of utter mediocrities - poorly educated, incurious, ambitious, ideological - at the heart of this nation's political power structure. Of course, the same holds true for those on Wall St - just add greedy to the mix there. (Am tempted to add 'corrupt' to the list of adjectives, but that would imply some semblence of intelligence/knowledge....)

Sickening excerpts include:

....no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans

The top officials (he) briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

....The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said

Read the whole thing folks. But have a barf bag nearby....