by Sandi Crain

Created on: August 27, 2009   Last Updated: August 29, 2009

It's time to face the facts and deal with the way in which the U.S. has waged the War on Terror. The newly released, though still very redacted, Inspector General Report from the CIA has made it clear. The U.S. has been torturing prisoners and it's not just a "few bad apples" in the military or private mercenary, but a result of orders that came from the top.

Sometime in 2002, George Tenet, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice and John Ashcroft, held a meeting in which they discussed in detail which torture methods they could get away with using on prisoners held by the U.S. In 2003, when the CIA sought confirmation on these techniques they were being asked to perform, the administration once again gave the go-ahead.

It's also recently come out that the White House pressured interrogators to use torture in order to gain false information that would back up the story that Saddam Hussein did, indeed, have weapons of mass destruction. Regardless of Dick Cheney's belief that the U.S. would have to court the Dark Side in the War on Terror, it's just plain wrong.

Our treatment of prisoners in this war has been extremely unconstitutional. The act of pulling suspects off the streets and allowing them to disappear into prisons, violates the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th amendments, as stated in the Bill of Rights. Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution requires the U.S. to accept all treaties signed as Law of the Land and making the Geneva Conventions an extension of that Constitution.

Regardless of what name one chooses to call our prisoners, our treatment of them breaks the law and those who broke that law should be prosecuted under the laws that they chose to manipulate or simply ignore.

One of the arguments against prosecution that is often used is that the "enhanced interrogation methods" weren't really torture. This is faulty reasoning. The hundreds of prisoners who have died in U.S. custody are physical proof that these methods were cruel, inhuman, and degrading acts of violence.

Many of the interrogators, themselves, questioned the legality of what they were being ordered to do. The recently released CIA IG report specifically states that "unauthorized, improvised, inhumane, and undocumented detention and interrogation methods were used"-(section 258 IG Report).

What many fail to consider while deciding for themselves if these methods are right or wrong is that few if any of these prisoners are guilty of any crime. Some were rounded up for being in the wrong place at the wrong

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