A Friendly Reminder: Why George W. Bush Was A Terrible President

An admission: while I spent years watching and writing about the Bush Administration, I have not rushed out to buy a copy of George W. Bush's ghost-written autobiography. I have not watched or listened to one of his many media interviews.

All it took was Bush's take-away headline yesterday morning --- the false claim that his approval of torture via waterboarding prevented Terrorist Attacks in the United Kingdom --- to  reinforce years of conclusion that the 43rd President was/is a) lying b) immoral c) blissfully ill-informed d) all of the above. 

And I do not think that hundreds of pages of text can do more than this Bushian comparison, made in his television promotion on Tuesday: 1) Torture was not wrong 2) What was wrong was pouring vodka into my sister's aquarium, killing her goldfish.

Stephen Walt, however, did have the patience to go beyond the puffery to offer an incisive critique of Bush's "Delusion Points". He begins with an essential case for not giving in to historical revision/forgetting:

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Humiliate, Strip, Threaten: "Enhanced Interrogation", British Style (Cobain)

The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.

Training materials drawn up secretly in recent years tell interrogators they should aim to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear in the prisoners they are questioning, and suggest ways in which this can be achieved.

One PowerPoint training aid created in September 2005 tells trainee military interrogators that prisoners should be stripped before they are questioned. "Get them naked," it says. "Keep them naked if they do not follow commands." Another manual prepared around the same time advises the use of blindfolds to put prisoners under pressure.

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