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Monstrous

Bush cannot be allowed to paint over the atrocities committed during his presidency. He, and all those who participated at all levels, should be held fully accountable by both American and international courts of law:

A detainee at a secret CIA detention site in Afghanistan was used as a living prop to teach trainee interrogators, who lined up to take turns at knocking his head against a plywood wall, leaving him with brain damage, according to a US government report.

The details of the torture of Ammar al-Baluchi are in a 2008 report by the CIA’s inspector general, newly declassified as part of a court filing by his lawyers aimed at getting him an independent medical examination.

Baluchi, a 44-year-old Kuwaiti, is one of five defendants before a military tribunal on Guantánamo Bay charged with participation in the 9/11 plot, but the case has been in pre-trial hearings for 10 years, mired in a dispute over legal admissibility of testimony obtained after torture.

I truly don’t understand why the media are so eager to portray Bush today as a some kind of avuncular figure puttering around in his art studio, a reminder that “Republicans could be serious politicians.” When he was president, the US became victim to its worst atrocity since Pearl Harbor (a direct result of his neglect); the US invaded another country on lies that Bush well knew were lies; Bush showed stunning incompetence and a lack of empathy for the victims of Hurricane Katrina; and so very much more.

Bush was a catastrophically bad American leader, the worst president ever — until the Republicans gleefully decided they could go even lower.

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