Peony from Penny

A year or two ago, neighbor Penny begged us to take this beautiful Peony (Paeonia officinalis) off her hands.

It has become a beautiful part of our LipsYard Perennial bed,

and a nice companion for our existing white Peony. In some societies, a chain of beads cut from the dried root is worn as a protection against illness and injury, and to cure insanity.

Too bad our President hasn't been wearing one of those, because it seems the insanity thing has been with him for a while. Take the administration's policy on torture for example.

For years now, the Bush White House has claimed that the United States does not conduct torture. Prisoner abuse at places like Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it has asserted, was an aberration- the work of a few "bad apples" on the night shift. When the CIA used "enhanced" interrogation techniques such as waterboarding (simulated drowning,) the abuse, according to Bush officials, did not add up to torture.

But as more and more documents from inside the Bush government come to light, it is increasingly clear that the administration sought from early on to implement interrogation techniques whose basis was torture. Soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon and the CIA began an orchestrated effort to tap expertise from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school, for use in the interrogation of terrorist suspects.

The U.S. military's SERE training is designed to inoculate elite soldiers, sailors and airmen to torture, in the event of their capture, by an enemy that would violate the Geneva Conventions. Those service members are subjected to forced nudity, stress positions, hooding, slapping, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and, yes, in some cases, waterboarding.

SERE training has nothing to do with effective interrogation, according to military experts. Trained interrogators don't work in the program. Skilled, experienced interrogators, in fact, say that only a fool would think that the training could somehow be reverse-engineered into effective interrogation techniques. But that's exactly what the Bush government sought to do. As the plan rolled forward, military and law enforcement officials consistently sent up red flags that the SERE-based interrogation program wasn't just wrongheaded, it was probably illegal.

Yesterday, the Senate Armed Services Committee conducted a hearing on the evolution of abusive interrogations under the Bush administration. Through a series of memos and documents released by the committee, some old and some new, the following timeline has now been established. Committee chairman Carl Levin, the senior Democrat from Michigan, discussed this timeline at length in his opening statement.

See the Bush torture policy timeline for yourself HERE.