You’re absolutely right. The messed up truth is, every president, Democrat or Republican, going back at least as far as Johnson, probably farther, has presided over an America that tortures.
It weakens our freedom, it weakens our Constitution, and it hurts us when we throw away our own values. We’re supposed to be the good guys.
All Bush/Cheney did was fail to hide it well enough. Now that it’s out in the open, Obama needs to disown it. If we feel like it’s no big deal when we use it on our enemies, it’s not much of a stretch to a government you oppose (like Obama’s) deciding that some of those “enemies” are right here inside our borders.
The use of waterboarding and other techniques commonly described as torture well predates Johnson. We used similar techniques against Filipino rebels during the Philippine Insurrection. One soldier court-martialed for killing a Catholic priest and several others through waterboarding during that war was refused by the military tribunal judging him from presenting into evidence the fact that his commander, General Grant (son of the Civil War general), supervised police officers using the same techniques while serving as Police Commissioner in New York City before the war. American occupying troops used torture against Nazi diehards engaged in a resistance movement in Germany. The U.S. Army, state militias, local posses, and Indian tribes often used inhumane methods against their enemies during the Plains Indian Wars. As the author of Ecclesiastes wrote, there is nothing new under the sun.
The defenders of waterboarding fall into the trap of the ends justifying the means. Its opponents engage in ridiculous exaggeration when comparing the techniques used with the extreme measures of the Japanese, the Communists, and the Nazis.