Photos: Cooper Neill/AP, Ron Jenkins/AP

Bush should be treated as a pariah not because he is a Republican or a conservative, but because he caused the deaths of thousands of innocent people and tortured hundreds of others.

Ask the family of Gul Rahman. As a major report by the Open Society’s Justice Initiative documented, it was Bush who “authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to commence a secret detention program” after 9/11, under which suspected terrorists were held incommunicado in CIA black sites across the world, and it was also the then-president who granted the agency “expansive authority to engage in ‘extraordinary rendition’” — or the transfer of detainees to foreign governments for the purposes of interrogation and torture. (Asked by aides if he was OK with torturing detainees, Bush replied: “Damn right.”) Rahman was a suspected Afghan militant in his early 30s, who was sent by the CIA in 2002 to a secret prison known as the Salt Pit. There, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture, he endured “48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower, and rough treatment.” Shackled to a concrete wall, and nude from the waist down, he froze to death — but the Bush administration never even bothered to notify his family. Ask Maher Arar. The 32-year-old Canadian citizen was arrested at JFK Airport in New York in September 2002 and “rendered” to his native Syria, from where his family had fled in 1997. Back in Damascus, President Bashar al-Assad’s interrogators, with the assistance of questions supplied by Bush’s CIA, beat and tortured Arar. According to the findings of an official Canadian commission of inquiry, Arar was held in a cell the size of a grave and whipped with electrical cables. Ask the 780 detainees who were held at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, after it was opened by Bush in January 2002. Forty of them still remain behind bars; 15 of them were juveniles; nine of them died in custody. None of them were ever charged or convicted of a crime in a court of law. According to former Bush administration official Lawrence Wilkerson, the then-president knew many of the detainees at Guantánamo were innocent of any crimes but refused to release them for political reasons.

This slow but steady rehabilitation of the former president, and the whitewashing of his manifest crimes, cannot be left unchallenged.