We do not torture

That's what the President said yesterday. Phew! That's a relief! A while back, I wrote about torture, and happily, it seems I was mistaken.

Oh wait... There are some people who aren't buying it. Might Dear Leader have, er, misspoke? See, if you define a term narrowly enough, you can always claim it doesn't apply to you. But that's bullshit, as Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says:

First the administration defined torture so narrowly that torture according to them was not torture... And now that the administration has broadened the definition again it still insists on employing coercive interrogation techniques that constitute torture -- water boarding is a method they employ -- they claim it merely amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment -- but the world knows it is torture.

Back in June there was a brouhaha in which Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), on the Senate floor, denounced such treatment as characteristic of oppressive regimes. The message was lost, however, when he made an unfortunate comparison to the Nazis.

One other comparison he made was to the gulags of the former Soviet Union. As we've learned in the past few days, this was comparison was also unfortunate -- unfortunate because it turns out our CIA has been operating actual gulags in former Communist Bloc countries. I should mention that I haven't come across any reports of how prisoners have been treated at these "black sites," but the fact that they operate outside the law or any sort of external scrutiny is worrisome. A little light needs to shine on these places.