Friday morning I posted about Bush legalizing waterboarding. That evening, Bill Moyers' Journal had a compelling and disturbing segment on the use of torture by U.S. forces. It was about the Oscar-nominated documentary film, Taxi to the Dark Side, directed by Alex Gibney who made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The Moyers segment includes excerpts from the film and testimony of prisoners falsely accused and tortured in Afghanistan and Iraq. Watch it.
Key quote:
Despite Rumsfeld's and Cheney's and President Bush's allegations that these guys are the worst of the worst, that they were all captured on the battlefield, recent studies of the whole compendium of the government's documents show that only five percent of these people were picked up by the United States. Only eight percent of them are accused of being members of the Al Qaeda. Over 90 percent of them were picked up by Northern Alliance or Pakistani forces in exchange for bounties.
Ryan Rodrick Beiler is the Web editor for Sojourners.
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