I want my colleagues and the American public to know that measured against the information I have been able to gain access to, the story line we have been led to believe--the story line about waterboarding we have been sold--is false in every one of its dimensions.
The speech goes further than President Obama's and Russ Feingold's and Carl Levin's calls on Cheney's lies in two ways. First, those other calls focused on whether the documents Cheney wants declassified actually say what he claims they say; Whitehouse focused on whether Cheney's more basic claims about torture are true. And second, Whitehouse here focuses not on whether we needed waterboarding to get intelligence (Obama, for example, said, "the public reports and the public justifications for these techniques -- which is that we got information from these individuals that were subjected to these techniques -- doesn't answer the core question, which is: Could we have gotten that same information without resorting to these techniques?), but whether we actually got any useful intelligence from the methods at all.
But for me, even more important was the sentiment of patriotic indignation, exquisitely expressed in relentlessly thorough logic, and culminating in lead quote above, toward the end of the speech carrying with it the accumulated weight of the various key falsehoods Whitehead had knocked down the course of his speech. This was a masterful conclusion to a compelling presentation in which Whitehouse framed the issue of torture in terms of values, not just in the abstract, but in terms of lived history confronting threats far more dangerous to our survival as a nation. This speech clearly defined for one and all what a progressive perspective on torture looks like.
Yesterday, during Senate debate on Lilly Ledbetter, Senator Whitehouse got up and said the following:
As the President looks forward and charts a new course, must someone not also look back to take an accounting of where we are, what was done, and what must now be repaired? Our new President has said, ``America needs to look forward.'' I agree. Our new Attorney General-designate has said: We should not criminalize policy differences. I agree, and I hope we can all agree that summoning young sacrificial lambs to prosecute, as we did after Abu Ghraib, would be reprehensible.
But consider the pervasive, deliberate, and systematic damage the Bush administration did to America, to her finest traditions and institutions, to her reputation, and integrity. I evaluate that damage in history's light. Although I am no historian, here is what I believe: The story of humankind on this Earth has been a long and halting march from the darkness of barbarism and the principle that to the victor go the spoils, to the light of organized civilization and freedom.
