As Faux News personality Sean Hannity makes light of torture with his headline-grabbing offer to undergo waterboarding for charity, and MSNBC's Keith Olberman gets in on the one-lowmanship with offers of sponsorship, the blogosphere is all atwitter with tales of the "newsmen's" bravado. The attention is unsurprising; who wouldn't pay to see Hannity tortured? I know cheap thrills are scarce these days, and I don't want to rain on the parade. I just hope you know that you're being had.

The Sean Hannity "waterboard me" media circus is no more than a clever ploy. This Fox chickenhawk (along with others in the media) is focusing attention on waterboarding, when there are much more sinister happenings afoot. While we're busy obsessing over Hannity's blustering and bugs in boxes, there's one thing that gets glossed over in the torture debate over and over again -- we didn't just torture people, we killed them!

As we debate the merits of trying Bush, Cheney, and their band of fellow sadists for war crimes, let's not forget the charge of murder one. Apparently, many in the mainstream press and blogosphere already have.

The focus right now is on the recently released legal memos justifying the horrifying and numbing repetition of torture against "high profile" targets. We have a short memory in America and most of what was in these memos -- except for the diabolical excess of the waterboarding and the medieval torture by insects -- was, as President Obama has said, pretty much already known.

Also known, but not discussed at this time, is that less important Al-Qaeda figures were murdered as a result of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld torture jihad (their techniques euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation" by the mainstream corporate press).

Uh, remember those photos of bludgeoned prisoners in body bags that came out of Abu Ghraib? (And we still have only seen a small portion of the visual evidence.) Those people were murdered as a result of the greenlight on torture. Even the Pentagon has declared some of the Guantanamo dead were victims of homicide.

A 2006 Human Rights First report estimated that nearly 100 people had died in U.S. custody as part of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since August 2002:

Furthermore, in 2008, Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell and a man who came over from the dark side to tell the truth, testified before Congress that a minimum of 25 people died in U.S. detention as a result of homicides -- and that the figure was probably higher.

Then there are many "renditioned" individuals who disappeared into torture prisons around the world and have never reappeared. ProPublica investigated human rights groups' and CIA documents and determined that at least 32 terrorism suspects that were in CIA custody have gone missing. The CIA declined to comment on the list, aside from saying it was probably "flawed." There's no way to confirm whether these people are even still living, much less what techniques they've been subjected to. However, the whole situation has the stench of Latin American dictators "disappearing" people attached to it.

With Americans' heads swimming in these many sets of numbers, the individual stories within this sad chapter of our country's history are easily forgotten. This is why the indispensable documentary Taxi to the Dark Side should be required viewing material for every American. The central victim in this story was not waterboarded. Nor was he thought to be guilty of anything beyond driving by Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base at the wrong time. Still, his legs were beaten to the point that they would've had to have been amputated, had he not died from the beating.

But whether or not the government ultimately concludes that these and other deaths were murders, the fact remains that people died in American custody. The responsibility is ours. Even suicides cannot be ruled out. The military has a history of using suicide as a cover for homicide, and there's no way to say whether or not torture has driven a person to suicide.

There are undoubtedly more terrible torture stories that will be unearthed in the coming months and years, and they will cause Americans to both cringe and deny. Meanwhile, the Bush defenders are countering with an allegation that the torture of two or three suspects produced important information (which thus far has not been proven by any facts). But the focus on two or three Al Qaeda leaders has taken attention away from an organized system of torture that resulted in untold deaths, also known as murder.

For these murders, George W. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld -- who have always had a mean streak of sadism running through their blood, as they micro-managed torture and personally reviewed torture tapes -- should be charged and tried for war crimes -- and murder one.

If we do not bring justice to their deaths, who will?

The evidence of criminal abuse, including rape and murder, that was authorized as a general torture and abuse policy directly from the White House on down is abundant. It only need be assembled as legally admissible proof of guilt in an American court of law or International War Crime Tribunal.

As just one of literally hundreds -- perhaps thousands of examples -- a Salon article in 2004 noted a report by the indefatigable "last of his kind" investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh:

We don’t know how much evidence has been destroyed -- the CIA "disappeared" the torture tapes -- but clearly the shredders and "burn bags" were kept busy in the last days of the Bush Administration. Still, the Obama WH is ordering more devastating detainee abuse photos released in the near future.

But all of these are just small pieces in the very large puzzle of a massive White House orchestrated sanctioning of War Crimes, including rape and murder.

It is not unexpected that the corporate mainstream media would attempt to minimize the criminal behavior of the Bush Administration, because D.C. insiders -- the villagers -- and the corporate oligarchy protects its own. But I am a bit mystified why the progressive blogs and most liberal and civil liberties websites are more caught up with fingering the authors of the memos rather than the masterminds of the war crimes policies: Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice (not to mention Wolfowitz, Feith, etc.).

As has been pointed out by others, after WW II some Japanese tried for war crimes were hanged for waterboarding allied prisoners. The torture unto death, rape, sexual violations, and abuse that violated the Geneva Conventions was rampant in the Bush gulag.

The most pressing issue of justice is not who wrote the memos that enabled torture (murder and rape) -- although the attorneys should be held accountable -- but who should be tried for initiating and promoting war crimes.

Murder is not something to split hairs about on Sunday morning talk shows. It belongs in a courtroom so that justice can be rendered, the perpetrators jailed, and the Constitution preserved.


Mark Karlin is editor and publisher of BuzzFlash.com, which this May will be celebrating its ninth year of progressive news and commentary on the Internet through an expanded network of websites.