Throughout the war with Iraq  under the Bush administration, the question of torture seemed to provoke the basest of sensibilities. 

On the one hand were the Jack Bauer types who believe in the ticking bomb scenario, on the other, are the Geneva Conventions, the War Crimes Act, and let’s face it - what’s left of humanity. 

But the question of torture and accountability is not uniquely American.  Bush had approved of 14 “techniques” to extricate information from  alleged terrorists and, most disturbing, innocent people. 

I won’t go through list of techniques, we know them or of them and have been employed since the Middle Ages.  Instead, it should be noted that Europe’s complacency in allowing the US to torture, allowing the CIA to fly more than 1000 “extraordinary renditions” flights through and even land in the EU, is an understudy that also deserves the full extent of exposure and transparency.

US journalist Maura Stephens once described how one man, on his way to work on a morning in December, was approached by three men in US military uniforms.  They asked him his name, he acknowledged, at which point he was hooded and thrown into the back of a truck. 

He spent the next five months at Abu Ghraib where he was jailed, naked, and endured beatings and humiliation.  Sodomized by a gun barrel and electrocuted.  You know this man.  You have seen his photo standing on a box, hooded, with wires attached.  His name is Hajji Ali.

Tomorrow, June 26th, is the International Day in the Support of Victims.  At that moment on Link TV, the premiere of the Culture Project’s “Blueprint for Accountability,” will show General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top coalition commander in Iraq, call for a Truth Commission. 

It is a first and flies in the face of President Obama’s unfortunate reversal of his campaign promise to hold accountable those guilty of this madness.

Retired in 2006, the former General is also known for his strong views against the Bush administration and the war in Iraq.

 Check it out at youtube: