Kevin Drum has a post today on torture at Camp X-Ray, which was taped. Here’s the thing. Right after 9/11, the White House told us they were going to do a bunch of nonstandard stuff, outside the bounds of international law, like imprison “unlawful combatants” that we captured in Afghanistan far from their homes in Cuba, provide them with no legal representation, try them in secret military courts, and generally create a parallel legal system that would probably be most at home in an autocratic country run by a dictator. Most people who care about human rights were opposed to all of this, but the bottom line is that by doing all this, they implicitly took on the challenge of doing it while maintaining what we like to think of as “American values.” They didn’t. Not only didn’t they, but they tainted other operations with the horrible, illegal tactics that they came up with that were originally supposed to be just for terrorists. I think that at this point, the secret tribunals for terrorists should be completely off the table. Every other phase of this program has been proven to be tainted, why should we let this program to continue? The Bush administration asked for special privileges, and they blew it. Period. We can’t trust them. Some people knew it all along, but anyone who still trusts them to safeguard the constitution at this point is in denial.