Exactly

Via Digby, Ron Suskind who outlined the base torture of a mentally disturbed and broken Al Qaeda drone, Abu Zubadayah in "The One Percent Solution" was on Rachel Maddow and condensed it all down:

...as frustration built inside of the White House, that there was no link that was established—because the CIA told the White House from the very start there is no Saddam/al Qaeda link. We checked it out. We did every which way. Sorry.

The White House simply wouldn‘t take no for an answer and it went with another method. Torture was the method. “Get me a confession, I don‘t care how you do it.” And that bled all the way through the government, both on the CIA side and the Army side. It‘s extraordinary.

Mind you, Rachel, this is important. This is not about an impetus to foil an upcoming potential al Qaeda attacks. The impetus here is largely political diplomatic. The White House had a political diplomatic problem. It wanted it solved in the run-up to the war.

And then the real issue to find out:

My question, the question for investigators now: Is how many of these interrogations were driven specifically by a desire to come up with the Saddam/al Qaeda link? It‘s essentially rivers coming together.

It's disgusting.

I disagree with many folks who are treating Bush/Cheney as equal to the Holocaust (not as ridiculous as what Glenn Beck does, but still...). That's insanity. There are some parallels as there are and always will be with criminal misbehavior of governments. But the Nazi's literally made their innocent victims dig their own graves and then shot them in mass -- DAILY. 33,000 gunned down at Baba Yar alone. Millions systematically gassed. Those crimes are incomparable, don't cheapen them by tossing Bush and Cheney in with them.

Those comparisons only lead to treating Bush/Cheney unfairly and that's bullshit. What they did is more than bad enough without going out of your way to overstate it. What they did is facilitated a war (like Operation Canned Goods) and large scale death, but not on the scale of Hitler and company. But it was more than evil and base enough -- let's stick to that.

To facilitate their illegal war they engaged in illegal torture.

They're not Hitler, they're not Pol Pot.

But they are Americans and they did this, those two facts in and of themselves are more than bad enough to merit they receive more justice than just looking forward. It's worse than Nixon & bombing Cambodia IMO and that's fucking bad enough.