Absolutely Outraged.

I am completely outraged by the behavior of the CIA.  I'm an American. I love America.  I believe that America's role in the world is to be a beacon of freedom and hope.  I believe that our goal is to ensure justice in our society and that we have a responsibility to uphold these values.

The Bush administration (along with the entirety of the Republican Party and the so-called "moderates" who vote for Republicans and Bush) has done more to destroy my faith in America than I ever would have though possible.

We now know for a fact that our government was torturing people.   The CIA has effectively told us that this torture was so awful that rather than even risk that it might someday be leaked that the tapes of this torture had to be destroyed.  They failed to provide those tapes when they were required to do so.  We are told by the NY Times that these decisions were made at the "highest levels" within the CIA.  This means Porter Goss (then head of the CIA) and by extension President Bush.

They keep attempting to redefine the word torture by calling it "enhanced interrogation techniques."  However, waterboarding which is specifically mentioned as being used in these tapes has been explicitly defined as torture in a number of places including our own military manuals, the Geneva Conventions (to which we are signatories thus making them under our Constitution the "law of the land").  

We, the American people have allowed our government to get away with torture to this point.  We now know that our intelligence community is out of control and that the only solution to this is proper oversight.  Until Congress puts into place proper oversight laws we will be subject to "signing statements," evasion of oversight, outright lies to oversight agencies and in the above case, direct violation of the law.  

We need a President who will actually sign these laws and a Congress that will pass them.  This means we need people to stop voting for Republicans until such time as they can be shown to actually hold the values that make America great.  

The "values" they hold don't cut the mustard.  I don't need a government that tries to prevent Terri Schiavo from peacefully dying.  I don't need a government that tells women how to manage their own bodies.  I don't need a government that legislates how we live our lives in the bedroom.  I don't need a government that believes privacy is a thing of the past.   I don't need a government that feels it can ignore the 4th amendment.  I want a government that values science over superstition.  I want a government that doesn't fucking torture people.  I am absolutely outraged this morning.