You have to torture a few eggs to make an omelet.

Another story I should've written about sooner, and another link from Salon. When it was reported that Bush would have to scale down his torture demands amid an outbreak of common sense among a handful of prominent Republican senators and Colin Powell, it also emerged that BushCo had detained an innocent man and sent him to Syria to be tortured.

These two events should spell the end of Bush's torture agenda. But unless the media connects the two stories, as it should, it probably won't have any effect. It certainly hasn't changed Bush's plans-- not unlike his total confidence that the death penalty has never meant the execution of an innocent man in light of the release of dozens of unjustly convicted death-row inmates after DNA testing.

Despite the stonewalling and coverup by the Bush administration, the Canadian report was able to conclude "categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense." It also found that both the American government and the Syrian government lied to Canada about Arar's whereabouts because they knew the Canadians would object to their citizen being brought to Syria to be tortured. Put another way, our government abducted a completely innocent Canadian citizen and deliberately caused him to subjected, in Syria, to the most brutal and inhumane treatment imaginable (where, among other things, he confessed under torture to training in an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan even though he was never in that country).

Now that all of this has been revealed (by the Canadian government, which -- as free and open governments do -- candidly acknowledged its own unjust role in this travesty), what is the Bush administration's reaction? Obfuscation, denial, bureaucratic buck passing and outright deceit. The New York Times reports on the reprehensible refusal of Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department even to admit the most basic facts and acknowledge that anything wrong occurred here, let alone to accept responsibility for it and make amends.