George Bush’s avuncular cheerleader for torture, Donald Rumsfeld, is facing another civil suit. Good news, but why no criminal charges from Barack Obama’s Department of Justice?

It seems Eric Holder and the gang have yet to acknowledge arguments comparing Bush era “interrogation techniques” to Soviet torture of inmates documented by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago:

Enforced sleeplessness… was favored because it was cheap, easy, and left no marks on the prisoner—not to mention that it was effective. Solzhenitsyn attested from bitter experience that “it is not really necessary to use a rack or hot coals to drive a human being out of his mind.”

But American intelligence officials also learned something from the Soviets about manipulating language to conceal reality. When our enemies use methods like this, they amount to torture. When we do, they don’t. A newly released 2002 memo from a Bush administration official authorized keeping prisoners awake because “we are not aware of any evidence that sleep deprivation results in severe physical pain or suffering.”

How ironic that the 2009 article quoted above appeared in Reason, a libertarian magazine, and that Democrats therefore would probably dismiss it as the work of a kook. The sadder irony is that Obama has allowed many illegal and extralegal policies put in place under Bush and his team to continue, and very few establishment Dems have called him on it.

Clarification: I’m not a libertarian, and I think many of their views are crazy, especially regarding the economy. But at least they don’t think it’s OK to crush human rights and civil liberties in the name of national security.

Almost forgot: Where is the mainstream media concerning the government’s kidnapping and imprisonment of U.S. citizens who haven’t been charged with crimes? MIA.