The Trib Favors Torture

From today's Op-Ed page at the Tribune-Review:

Terrorist-killing drone strikes carry an often overlooked cost: lost opportunities to gather intelligence about terrorist plots. And the Obama administration's renunciation of interrogation techniques that helped foil at least 10 such plots exacerbates that problem.

So says Jose A. Rodriguez. Some think the former CIA counterterrorism chief and best-selling "Hard Measures" author could be CIA director in a Romney administration.

He tells The Washington Free Beacon that there's no U.S. system or facilities in place today for questioning captured terrorist leaders: "They are not taking prisoners in Guantanamo, (and) the black sites have been closed." He blames the Obama administration for America's terror intelligence gap.

Here's the article on Rodriguez in the Free Beacon.

We can talk about the "black sites" but let's talk about the interrogation techniques torture instead.

Here's the Trib:

President Obama's 2009 Cairo speech "unequivocally" prohibiting "torture" outraged and disgusted him and his colleagues. They believed they had proper authorization for harsh interrogations.

Note the quotation marks.  The first set actually quotes but the second imposes an ironical spin.  It's not torture if it's "torture".  And George W. Bush isn't a war criminal if he's a "war criminal".  See how the ironic quotation marks work?

And this is from Obama's speech in Cairo and here's the Executive Order that prohibited the torture.

It's a bit of a redundancy as torture was already illegal.

From the Conventions Against Torture (signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988 and ratified by the US Senate in 1994 - therefore it's US Law):

For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

That's Article 1. Article 2 includes this:

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

No extenuating circumstances.  No "I was just following orders" either.  That's been a part of US Law for almost 2 decades.

Torture is illegal.  Covering up torture (like destroying the video evidence something Jose Rodriguez ordered) is also illegal.

What part of "illegal" doesn't the Trib understand?