Confirmed: The Dark Side

About a month ago, I blogged a bit about Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. I was convinced by her argument, but one always wonders about them there journalists and their godless liberal agendas....

Enter the U.S. Senate’s Report of the Committee on Armed Services, dated Nov. 20, 2008 – about four months after Mayer’s book was published – which was just put up on the Senate’s website.

I’ll need some time to slog through the 263-page document, but I found this nugget in the Executive Summary. There’s a lot packed into one short paragraph, so savor it:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of “a few bad apples” acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority. This report is a product of the Committee’s inquiry into how those unfortunate results came about.

This is pretty much Mayer's thesis.

Score one for the journalist....