“Highly Trained Professionals”

Watch the lying liar lie.

From the Wednesday New York Times blockbuster:

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

Lawyers like Steven Bradbury and Alberto Gonzales, who had once said the Geneva Conventions were “quaint.” There is quite a string of absolutely provably false statements in Bush’s outburst above. He did no better at resolving this growing scandal than his spokeswoman did in the video below. But just for the sake of argument, suppose that Bush’s claim that US torture interrogators are “highly trained professionals” were true. Who trained them?