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All Entries Tagged With: "torture"
UN expert slams US for not looking into torture claims
The UN’s independent expert on torture on Wednesday criticised the Obama administration for not investigating allegations of torture made when president George W. Bush was in power.
“This is my criticism of the Obama administration: There is not enough done to remedy what has been done in the past,” Manfred Nowak, UN special rapporteur on torture, told journalists.
“I think it’s a legal question,” he said.
“The US are a part of the UN Convention against Torture, but there are very clear legal obligations — wherever you have indications, complaints about torture, then you have to investigate them independently and effectively.”
Full Story: UN expert slams US for not looking into torture claims | Raw Story.
CIA working with Palestinian security agents (Allegations of CIA Involvement in West Bank Torture)
US agency co-operating with Palestinian counterparts who allegedly torture Hamas supporters in West Bank
Palestinian security agents who have been detaining and allegedly torturing supporters of the Islamist organisation Hamas in the West Bank have been working closely with the CIA, the Guardian has learned.
Less than a year after Barack Obama signed an executive order that prohibited torture and provided for the lawful interrogation of detainees in US custody, evidence is emerging the CIA is co-operating with security agents whose continuing use of torture has been widely documented by human rights groups.
The relationship between the CIA and the two Palestinian agencies involved – Preventive Security Organisation (PSO) and General Intelligence Service (GI) – is said by some western diplomats and other officials in the region to be so close that the American agency appears to be supervising the Palestinians' work.
Full Story CIA working with Palestinian security agents | World news | guardian.co.uk.
Canada bill clears way to sue foreign torturers
An opposition lawmaker unveiled Thursday proposed legislation that would allow victims of torture to sue the perpetrators, including foreign states and officials, in Canadian courts.
“Our present legislation criminalizes torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide — the most heinous acts known to humankind,” said opposition Liberal MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler.
“But Canadian law does not allow a civil remedy for the victims of such horrific acts.
“This legislation will: address the evil of such international crimes; target the impunity of those states and officials that perpetrate these crimes; remove the state immunity that operates to shield the perpetrators of such crimes; and finally allow Canadian victims to secure justice.”
Canada's right-wing government and three opposition parties have yet to state positions on the proposed law, but individual members of all four parties have vowed to support it.
Maher Arar, a dual Canadian-Syrian citizen, claimed he was tortured in Syria after US authorities arrested him in New York in 2002.
Full Story AFP: Canada bill clears way to sue foreign torturers.
Gates Invokes New Authority to Block Release of Detainee Abuse Photos
Blood on the floor and walls of a cell at Abu Ghraib. Defense Secretary Robert Gates invoked his new authority to block images like these from being released under the Freedom of Information Act. (Photo: Wikicommons)
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has blocked the release of photographs depicting US soldiers abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, invoking new powers just granted to him by Congress that allows him to circumvent the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and keep the images under wraps on national security grounds.
In a brief filed with the US Supreme Court late Friday, Department of Defense General Counsel Jeh Johnson, and Solicitor General Elena Kagan, said Gates “personally exercised his certification authority” on Friday to withhold the photos and “determined that public disclosure of these photographs would endanger citizens of the United States, members of the United States Armed Forces, or employees of the United States Government deployed outside the United States.”
“Based on that determination, the Secretary has concluded that the photographs are ‘protected documents’” and are “exempt from mandatory disclosure under FOIA,” the government's brief states.
via t r u t h o u t | Gates Invokes New Authority to Block Release of Detainee Abuse Photos.
Report: CIA Interrogations Informed By Bad Science
The list of techniques the CIA used included prolonged sleep deprivation — six days in at least one instance — being chained in painful positions, exploitation of prisoners’ phobias, and waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that President Barack Obama has called torture. Three CIA prisoners were waterboarded, two of them extensively.
Prolonged stress from the CIA’s harsh interrogations could have impaired the memories of terrorist suspects, diminishing their ability to recall and provide the detailed information the spy agency sought, according to a scientific paper published Monday.
The methods could even have caused the suspects to create — and believe — false memories, contends the paper, which scrutinizes the techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology. It suggests the methods are actually counterproductive, no matter how much suspects might eventually say.
Full Story: Sci-Tech Today | Report: CIA Interrogations Informed By Bad Science.
REPORT: Key Terror Detainee Acknowledged ‘I Make Up Stories’ In Response To Torture
REPORT: Key Terror Detainee Acknowledged ‘I Make Up Stories’ In Response To Torture
The Bush administration has long justified its use of torture by claiming that it obtained valuable information from torturing 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Late last year, former Vice President Dick Cheney said, “Did it produce the desire results? I think it did.” He explained:
I think, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the number three man in al Qaeda, the man who planned the attacks of 9/11, provided us with a wealth of information.
But according to documents released by the Obama administration in response to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, Cheney was lying. Mohammed told U.S. military officials that he gave false information to the CIA after withstanding torture:
“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA that concerned the location of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
“Where is he? I don’t know. Then he torture me,” Mohammed said. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’”
via Think Progress » REPORT: Key Terror Detainee Acknowledged ‘I Make Up Stories’ In Response To Torture.
Expert Advice On Dealing With A Prior Administration’s Use of Torture
Expert Advice On Dealing With A Prior Administration’s Use of Torture 
By JOHN W. DEAN
No official announcement has been made that the Obama Administration is not going to prosecute anyone – other than a few low-level soldiers who photographed themselves and already have been prosecuted – for torturing detainees in our so-called war on terror. But it has become clear that President Obama’s announced desire to look forward, not backward, embodies such a decision.
Still, we must all hope that the Obama Administration makes more than a non-decision type of decision, and does not merely resolve the matter by silence and inaction. There are, in fact, precedents, and studies, that illuminate the grave problems confronting a democracy in making a choice when faced with the options of prosecuting and punishing versus forgiving and forgetting. I discovered this material some years ago when studying authoritarian governance.
The Insights of Samuel P. Huntington
I provided evidence in my recent book Conservatives Without Conscience that the Bush/Cheney presidency was the most authoritarian in American history. When doing research for that book, I read a work by the late Samuel P. Huntington, the highly- regarded Harvard political scientist and former president of the American Political Science Association. More specifically, I was interested in Professor Huntington’s survey of the transition to democracy, during the mid-1970s through the 1980s, of some thirty countries that had previously been under authoritarian rule, which Huntington wrote about in The Third Wave: Democratization In the Late Twentieth Century.
via Expert Advice On Dealing With A Prior Administration’s Use of Torture.
Obama Administration Seeks To Keep Torture Victims From Having Day In Court
American Civil Liberties Union :
Obama Administration Seeks To Keep Torture Victims From Having Day In Court (6/12/2009)
Justice Department Asks Court For Rehearing In Extraordinary Rendition Lawsuit Against Boeing Subsidiary
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
NEW YORK – The Justice Department today argued that the victims of the “extraordinary rendition” program should not have their day in court, asking a federal appeals court to block a landmark case the court had earlier ruled could go forward. In April, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen DataPlan Inc., for its role in the Bush administration’s unlawful “extraordinary rendition” program could proceed, but today the government asked the appeals court’s full panel of judges to rehear that decision.
“The Obama administration has now fully embraced the Bush administration’s shameful effort to immunize torturers and their enablers from any legal consequences for their actions,” said Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, who argued the case for the plaintiffs. “The CIA’s rendition and torture program is not a ’state secret;’ it’s an international scandal. If the Obama administration has its way, no torture victim will ever have his day in court, and future administrations will be free to pursue torture policies without any fear of liability.”
In April, the appeals court reversed a lower court dismissal of the lawsuit, brought on behalf of five men who were kidnapped, forcibly disappeared and secretly transferred to U.S.-run prisons or foreign intelligence agencies overseas where they were interrogated under torture. The Bush administration had intervened, improperly asserting the “state secrets” privilege to have the case thrown out. The appeals court ruled, as the ACLU has argued, that the government must invoke the “state secrets” privilege with respect to specific evidence, not to dismiss the entire suit.
“The extraordinary rendition program is well known throughout the world. The only place it hasn’t been discussed is where it most cries out for examination – in a U.S. court of law,” said Steven Watt, a staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program. “Attempts to keep this case from moving forward fly in the face of Obama’s promise to reaffirm our commitment to domestic and international human rights law and restore an America we can be proud of. Victims of extraordinary rendition deserve their day in court.”
Judge: Ex-Bush lawyer can be sued over torture
OPS: Well, Boo Hoo Yoo
Judge: Ex-Bush lawyer can be sued over torture
A prisoner who says he was tortured while being held for nearly four years as a suspected terrorist can sue former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo for coming up with the legal theories that justified his alleged treatment, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Friday.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White’s decision marks the first time a government lawyer has been held potentially responsible for the abuse of detainees.
“Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct,” White said in refusing to dismiss Jose Padilla’s lawsuit against Yoo.
If Padilla, now serving a 17-year prison sentence on terrorism charges, can prove his allegations, he can show that Yoo “set in motion a series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Padilla’s constitutional rights,” White said.
White, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, noted that Padilla’s lawsuit accuses Yoo of helping to design administration policy on detention and torture, and then crafting legal opinions to justify it – stepping outside the usual role of a lawyer.
‘Sickening’ torture report to be published Friday
More ’sickening’ truths about torture soon to be revealed
A crucial CIA Inspector General’s report from May 2004 is expected to reveal some long-hidden truths about the Bush administration’s use of torture.
According to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, “This report is sort of the big kahuna in terms of what we have been waiting to see from the government’s own files on torture. That report, which is long and has been described by people who have seen it as ’sickening,’ apparently stopped the torture program in its tracks.”
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) recently warned in a speech on the floor of the Senate that almost everything we think we know about the Bush administration’s torture program is wrong.
via Raw Story » More ’sickening’ truths about torture soon to be revealed.
Judge denies ACLU request to reveal US role in torture of American citizen
Judge denies ACLU request to reveal US role in torture of American citizen
A federal court judge in Washington, D.C. denied on Thursday a request by the American Civil Liberties Union to reveal alleged U.S. government involvement in the torture of Naji Hamdan, an American citizen.
Hamdan, a 42-year-old Muslim, father and small business owner from California, was arrested by United Arab Emirates authorities in August, 2008 and tortured repeatedly. During the abuse, he says, a man who spoke perfect English was present, ever threatening him to comply with his interrogators.
“In his ruling from the bench, U.S. District Judge James Robertson left the door open for the ACLU to bring new a new legal argument in the case, but said that the ACLU had not demonstrated he had sufficient legal authority to involve himself in the case [...]” noted ABC News. “Hamdan was detained for months by UAE officials before the government there charged him with three terror-related crimes.”
The network continued: “Robertson also said that the evidence the ACLU cited to argue that U.S. government officials may have been involved in Hamdan’s detention was based largely on ‘hearsay upon hearsay upon hearsay,’ and on Hamdan’s own allegations, which he called ’self-serving.’”
“His imprisonment appears to have been done at the request of the U.S. government, and his interrogation, which included severe torture, appears to have been done with participation of U.S. federal officials,” insists the ACLU. “If the U.S. government requested or participated in his detention and torture in the U.A.E., the United States government has violated this U.S. citizen’s most fundamental rights.”
via Raw Story » Judge denies ACLU request to reveal US role in torture of American citizen.
O’Reilly defends torture: ‘Look, if it were illegal, Bush and Cheney would have been arrested.’
OPS: … with the cowards on the Democratic side? Please….
O’Reilly defends torture: ‘Look, if it were illegal, Bush and Cheney would have been arrested.’
Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly has always been one of the most outspoken defenders of torture, declaring there’s “certainly no proof” that “mistreatment” ever happened at Guantanamo, and insisting it’s “just bull” to say it’s ineffective to “dunk [someone] into water.” Trying to link abortion (which is legal) and torture (which is not) in an argument with Juan Williams last night, O’Reilly insisted that torture must not be illegal since Bush or Cheney were never arrested:
WILLIAMS: Well, let me just say on the second point about Guantanamo Bay, Bill, that when you think about torture, torture is illegal. It’s illegal on the Geneva Convention. It’s illegal under U.S. law. So torture is illegal. [...]
O’REILLY: Juan, you’re hiding behind semantics and meaning, Juan, rather than getting to the crux of the matter. Look, if it were illegal, Bush and Cheney would have been arrested. You’re sitting authorities, the attorney general ruled waterboarding was not torture. It was legal. Rare occasion it was used.
Watch it:
Religious leaders to lobby Obama for torture inquiry
OPS: Its about damned time – where have you been hiding?
Religious leaders to lobby Obama for torture inquiry
Eight spiritual leaders from the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, representing some 250 member organizations from around the United States, will demonstrate in front of the White House on Thursday, giving “public witness” to their support of an inquiry on torture.
President Barack Obama has said repeatedly he would like to “look forward,” sidestepping calls from many in his own party to investigate torture of terror war prisoners authorized by the Bush administration.
Prior to their demonstration, the group will discuss their letter to the president at the National Press Club, beginning at 11 a.m., according to a media advisory. While the NRCAT delegates will not have an audience with the president, senior White House officials have agreed to meet with them, the group said.
via Raw Story » Religious leaders to lobby Obama for torture inquiry.
Torture goon squads at Gitmo”
Thom Hartmann talks w/Jeremy Scahill
YouTube – Thom talks w/Jeremy Scahill Torture goon squads at Gitmo”.
Cruel And Inhuman Treatment Causes More Mental Damage Than Physical Torture, Study Suggests
Cruel And Inhuman Treatment Causes More Mental Damage Than Physical Torture, Study Suggests
ScienceDaily (June 2, 2009) — New research findings by Dr Metin Başoğlu, Head of Section of Trauma Studies at King’s College London and the Istanbul Centre for Behaviour Research and Therapy, examines the psychological impact of war captivity, ‘cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment’ (CIDT) and physical torture. Findings revealed that being held captive in a hostile and life-threatening environment, deprivation of basic needs, sexual torture, psychological manipulations, humiliation, exposure to extreme temperatures, isolation, and forced stress positions appear to cause more psychological damage than physical torture.
This study at its essence concerns the question of what constitutes torture, is published on line in the April issue of the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry. Başoğlu writes that a priori assumptions of a distinction between torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatments have led some to argue that the latter are associated with less mental suffering than torture and therefore more acceptable in exceptional circumstances.
The research looks at the different risk factors associated with PTSD in former detainees, reporting that captivity experience in a war setting was associated with 2.8 times greater risk of PTSD in comparison to being detained by state authorities in someone’s own country, possibly due to the greater perceived threat to life in a war setting. Additionally, being held captive by an enemy was a stronger risk factor for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than the actual experience of torture itself. PTSD was also associated with CIDT and sexual abuse but not with physical torture.
via Cruel And Inhuman Treatment Causes More Mental Damage Than Physical Torture, Study Suggests.
Jimmy Carter Charges Obama “Doesn’t Want to Punish Those Who are Guilty” of Crimes
Jimmy Carter Charges Obama “Doesn’t Want to Punish Those Who are Guilty” of Crimes - by Jeremy Scahill
The Democratic Party power structure’s least favorite ex-President is speaking out of school again. Jimmy Carter has some strong words about President Obama’s decision to fight the release of thousands of photos that reportedly show further US abuse and torture of prisoners and has weighed in on the debate over prosecuting former Bush administration officials for torture. In an interview to be broadcast tonight on CNN, Carter says this about Obama’s position on the release of new torture photos:
[M]ost of [Obama's] supporters were hoping that he would be much more open in the revelation of what we’ve done in the past. But he’s made a decision with which I really can’t contend that he doesn’t want to resurrect the past, he doesn’t want to punish those who are guilty of perpetrating of what I consider crimes against our own laws and against our own constitution. And the revelation of those pictures might very well inflame further animosity against our country causing some harm to our soldiers, so I don’t agree with him, but I certainly don’t criticize him for making that decision.
Regarding calls for prosecution of former Bush administration officials, Carter says
Ex-Interrogators Are Mad as Hell About Torture, and They’re Not Gonna Take Cheney Anymore
Ex-Interrogators Are Mad as Hell About Torture, and They’re Not Gonna Take Cheney Anymore
MoveOn, VoteVets, and Brave New Foundation amplify testimonies of former interrogators.
More and more former interrogators and counterinsurgency experts are using Dick Cheney’s recent ubiquity to expose his iniquity regarding the torture and abuse of detainees. Earlier this week, I wrote about Major Matthew Alexander, the former Senior Interrogator who conducted over 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised 1,000 more. Alexander relied upon conventional means of interrogation, and his efforts led to the capture and killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. Yet Alexander also witnessed the perilous consequences of Cheney’s torture policy.
In an exclusive interview with Brave New Foundation, Alexander said, “At the prison where I conducted interrogations, we heard day in and day out foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.”
What The Hell Have We Become?
If we continue to allow the people who authorized torture to escape prosecution, and act like we don’t care that it even took place, we have to ask ourselves “what the hell have we become?” That’s the question that Mike Papantonio asks in this week’s fiery Pap Attack.
New report appears to directly contradict White House denial on abuse photos
OPS: Well, Sy Hersh has said that he has seen these videos – put your money is on Hersh
New report appears to directly contradict White House denial on abuse photos
A new report appears to directly contradict denials by the White House and the Pentagon that abuse photographs the Obama administration has withheld are worse than previously known.
In a posting Friday, an American reporter says he’s confirmed allegations printed in British newspapers that unreleased photographs of US servicemembers abusing prisoners include graphic images of rape, sexually explicit acts, sodomy and forced masturbation.
Probably most notable is an alleged photograph showing a man in a US military uniform receiving oral sex from a female prisoner.
The detailed descriptions of the photographs may provide new insight into what’s actually included among the images the administration has said it won’t release in response to a civil liberties group’s lawsuit.
via Raw Story » New report appears to directly contradict White House denial on abuse photos.
Torture Amendment 1157
The Torture Amendment You Never Heard Of 1157
Never heard of torture amendment 1157?
Don’t feel bad. It’s by design.
Torture amendment 1157 was passed on the eve of the Memorial Day weekend, so that no one would notice. Instead of paying attention to the particular legislative activities of the day before, Americans hit the beach, and then, when the Memorial Day weekend was over, the newspapers moved on to other stories.
Actually, few newspapers even acknowledged the existence of torture amendment 1157, given that they’ve laid off most of their journalistic staff. The small number of newspapers that did write about the amendment didn’t write about its full impact… read on
No Torture Needed — Cookies Did the Job
No Torture Needed — Cookies Did the Job
FBI Interrogator: didn’t need torture, just cookies.
Fascinating piece coming in tomorrow’s TIME magazine. Reporter Bobby Ghosh writes, “The most successful interrogation of an al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or ‘walling’ and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies.”
Former interrogator/member of the FBI Ali Soufan, who testified to Congress last month, tells TIME: “He was a diabetic … We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him …. So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures.” Ghosh points out, “Defenders of the Bush program, most notably Cheney, say the use of waterboarding produced actionable intelligence that helped the U.S. disrupt terrorist plots. But the experiences of officials like Soufan suggest that the utility of torture is limited at best and counterproductive at worst.”
Abu Ghraib Abuse Photos ‘Show Rape’
Abu Ghraib Abuse Photos ‘Show Rape’ | CommonDreams.org
Photographs of alleged prisoner abuse which Barack Obama is attempting to censor include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, it has emerged.
by Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent and Paul Cruickshank
At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.
Ventura: I’ll waterboard Hannity into saying Obama best president ever
Ventura: I’ll waterboard Hannity into saying Obama best president ever
After ripping George W. Bush and expressing his desire to waterboard Dick Cheney, former governor Jesse Ventura continues his media storm, this time in a sitdown with Huffington Post.
The ex-pro wrestler minced no words, as usual.
Americans have changed “in that we have a paranoia that there’s a crazy Arab around every tree,” Ventura told Marcus Baram. “We’re walking on eggshells now, when in reality you have as much chance of running into a terrorist as winning the Powerball.”
Related: Texas gov. will use stimulus funds to pay to repair mansion
He ripped into conservative talkers, such as Bill O’Reilly: “I always want to go on [his show], I’ve got something, I’m going to blast him for something. I don’t want to reveal what it is so he can’t prepare. But he doesn’t have the courage to have me on.”
On Sean Hannity, whose show Ventura guested on this week: “He’s scared to death of me. It was over in a few minutes and that was it.”
via Raw Story » Ventura: I’ll waterboard Hannity into saying Obama best president ever.
Liz Cheney and Lawrence O’Donnell Square Off on GMA
Liz Cheney and Lawrence O’Donnell on ABC’s Good Morning America, May 22, 2009
YouTube – Liz Cheney and Lawrence O’Donnell Square Off on GMA.
Spain’s Judges Cross Borders in Human Rights Cases: U.S. Officials Among Targets
Spain’s Judges Cross Borders In Rights Cases - washingtonpost.com
High-Ranking U.S. Officials Among Targets of Inquiries
MADRID — Spanish judges are boldly declaring their authority to prosecute high-ranking government officials in the United States, China and Israel, among other places, delighting human rights activists but enraging officials in the countries they target and triggering a political backlash in a nation uncomfortable acting as the world’s conscience.
Judges at Spain’s National Court, acting on complaints filed by human rights groups, are pursuing 16 international investigations into suspected cases of torture, genocide and crimes against humanity, according to prosecutors. Among them are two probes of Bush administration officials for allegedly approving the use of torture on terrorism suspects, including prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The judges have opened the cases by invoking a legal principle known as universal jurisdiction, which under Spanish law gives them the right to investigate serious human rights crimes anywhere in the world, even if there is no Spanish connection.
Liz Cheney Reveals That Fear Of Prosecution Motivates Dad’s Media Blitz Defending Torture
OPS: No shit
Liz Cheney Reveals That Fear Of Prosecution Motivates Dad’s Media Blitz Defending Torture
Since President Obama released Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos detailing the authorization of the Bush administration’s torture program, Vice President Cheney has taken to the public airwaves on numerous occasions, not only attacking Obama’s security policies but vigorously defending what he perceives (wrongly) as the efficacy of torture. “I’m convinced, absolutely convinced, that we saved thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives,” Cheney said recently on CBS.
In response, many in the media have asked why Cheney — someone who had avoided the media at all costs during his eight years as vice president — would be airing his opinions in such a forceful and public way. Indeed, Cheney himself has answered this question, claiming he is speaking out because he believes that torture and other Bush administration anti-terror policies — many of which Obama is abandoning — were “exactly the right thing to do” and that “there isn’t anybody there on the other side to tell the truth.”
In turn, media figures have answered the question in much the same way. “I think he genuinely believes we are threatened now more because of what Obama is doing,” MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan has said. CNN’s David Gergen said, “I think Dick Cheney almost has a Churchillian view of this, and that is somebody has got to stand up and be the voice in the wilderness.” But while the narrative of Cheney’s motives focuses mainly on the righteous, it has all but ignored the selfish — that Cheney is trying to muddle the public debate with the goal of reducing public support for a criminal inquiry into the torture regime that he authorized.
Intel experts: Dick Cheney was wrong about Bush administration moves
Intel experts: Dick Cheney was wrong about Bush administration moves
WASHINGTON – Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s high-profile speech Thursday defending the Bush administration’s policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements, according to intelligence officals and the historical record, including:
Cheney said waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques produced information that “prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.” He also quoted Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair as saying the information gave U.S. officials a “deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization.”
In his statement April 21, however, Blair said “these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.” A 2004 CIA inspector general’s investigation found no conclusive proof that the information helped thwart any “specific imminent attacks,” according to one of four secret Bush-era memos released last month. And FBI Director Robert Muller said in December that he didn’t think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.
via Intel experts: Dick Cheney was wrong about Bush administration moves – BostonHerald.com.
Video: Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It’s Torture
Video Included
Mancow Waterboarded, Admits It’s Torture “It is way worse than I thought it would be” – | NBC Chicago
And so it went Friday morning when WLS radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller decided to subject himself to the controversial practice of waterboarding live on his show.
Mancow decided to tackle the divisive issue head on — actually it was head down, while restrained and reclining.
“I want to find out if it’s torture,” Mancow told his listeners Friday morning, adding that he hoped his on-air test would help prove that waterboarding did not, in fact, constitute torture.
The debate over whether waterboarding constitutes torture reached a fever pitch this week as re-ignited claims that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) knew as early as 2002 about waterboarding techniques being used, and former Vice President Dick Cheney and President Barack Obama gave “dueling speeches” Thursday.
Listeners had the chance to decide whether Mancow himself or his co-host, Chicago radio personality Pat Cassidy, would undergo the interrogation method during the broadcast. The voters ultimately decided Mancow would be the one donning the soaked towel and shackles, and at about 8:40 a.m., he entered a small storage room next to his studio that was compared to a “dungeon” by Cassidy
OPS: There is more to the story at the following link. Below that is the video
Obama Says, “There will be NO prosecutions of anyone in Bush administration”
Obama Says, “There will be NO prosecutions of anyone in Bush administration” | AfterDowningStreet.org
No 9/11-Type Commissions, either. **BREAKING NEWS**- On The Rachel Maddow Show, Michael Isikoff reports a secret meeting at the White House today with Obama and AG Eric Holder and human rights activists. Obama announced, emphatically, “There will be NO prosecutions of anyone in the Bush administration” and “No 9/11-type commission either.
U.S. Congress to finally stand up against torture?
U.S. Congress to finally stand up against torture? – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com
Yesterday, President Obama approved a proposed civilian nuclear technology-sharing agreement between the U.S. and the United Arab Emirates and requested its execution, but CNN — in one of the all-time most unintentionally hilarious articles ever written — reports that its ratification is in doubt:
WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Obama on Thursday sent a civil nuclear agreement with the United Arab Emirates to the Senate for ratification, but its passage remains uncertain, thanks to a recently disclosed video.
Senior U.S. officials said lawmakers critical of the deal could use the video, which shows a member of the UAE government’s royal family torturing a man, to argue the United States should not have such nuclear cooperation with a country where the rule of law is not respected and human rights violations are tolerated.
How anyone could write or even read that last sentence without succumbing to painful, prolonged cackling is genuinely mystifying.
The videos in questions involve torture by a single individual citizen of the UAE, not an entire government. The individual torturer isn’t even part of the UAE’s government: he never worked in its Justice Department, doesn’t currently sit as a judge on a high-level court, doesn’t teach law in a prestigious university, doesn’t have his torture-defending speeches broadcast on national television by UAE news networks, isn’t constantly defended by admiring journalists any time he’s criticized, and doesn’t have hordes of TV pundits demanding that nothing be done to him. Also, the UAE legislature never passed any laws on a bipartisan basis retroactively immunizing him from the consequences of his torture.
via U.S. Congress to finally stand up against torture? – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.
Military attorney: Waterboarding is ‘tip of the iceberg’
OPS: Well, we already have reports of children being sodomized in front of their fathers - what the hell is still out there?
Military attorney: Waterboarding is ‘tip of the iceberg’
A military attorney who represented a now-freed Guantanamo detainee told CNN on Wednesday that waterboarding is only “the tip of the iceberg”
Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley was the lawyer for Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national who was arrested by the Pakistani government in April 2002 on suspicion of being a member of al Qaeda. He was then shuffled through a series of CIA “ghost prisons” before being imprisoned at Guantanamo for five years. Last winter, President Obama ordered him released to the United Kingdom, where he had been a legal resident.
Bradley told CNN that when she was first assigned to represent Mohamed, she did not question he was a hardened terrorist, because “my government was saying these were the worst of the worst.” However, she now says, “There’s no reliable evidence that Mr. Mohamed was going to do anything to the United States.”
According to Bradley, when Mohamed was first held at a CIA prison in Morocco, “They started this monthly treatment where they would come in with a scalpel or a razor type of instrument and they would slash his genitals, just with small cuts.”
Following that torture, Mohamed confessed that he had attended an al Qaeda training camp and discussed plans to make a dirty bomb. He also answered “No” to the question, “While in U.S. military custody have you been treated in any way that you would consider abusive?”
Now Bradley believes, “This has nothing to do about national security, it has to do with national embarrassment.”
via Raw Story » Military attorney: Waterboarding is ‘tip of the iceberg’.
Call To Disbar Torture Lawyers Is No Wild-Eyed, Left-Wing Plot
Accountability Watch: Call To Disbar Torture Lawyers Is No Wild-Eyed, Left-Wing Plot
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS – by Christine Bowman
It is not an eye for an eye, or a waterboard for a waterboard. In fact, it may better be described as a slap on the wrist. But a coalition of groups spearheaded by Voters For Peace and the Velvet Revolution, and represented at a D.C. press conference Monday by grass-roots activist and 2006 Green Party candidate Kevin Zeese, did move the accountability agenda forward by filing legal ethics complaints against 12 former Bush administration lawyers associated with providing legal justifications for torture. The disciplinary complaints seeking disbarment were filed with Wallace E. “Gene” Shipp Jr., bar counsel for the District of Columbia.
Rescinding the licenses of the likes of John Yoo and Jay Bybee may only embarrass and force torture-tainted lawyers to earn their money as lecturers or cable news pundits instead of by continuing to practice law, but it is a grass-roots start down the long road towards Bush Administration accountability. Citizens have found few paths other than through the ballot box, and even voting for Democrats has brought only mixed results.
An unsensational, straightforward presentation of the campaign’s rationale can be found at the Velvet Revolution website:
Torture is illegal under both United States and international law. …
via Accountability Watch: Call To Disbar Torture Lawyers Is No Wild-Eyed, Left-Wing Plot | BuzzFlash.org.
John Cusack’s Email to Obama’s Blackberry: You’re in Power, Don’t Let Cheney’s Torture Crew off the Hook
John Cusack’s Email to Obama’s Blackberry: You’re in Power, Don’t Let Cheney’s Torture Crew off the Hook
By John Cusack,
We can’t whitewash institutionalized torture, trash any conceivable notion of the rule of law, and call that ‘looking forward.’
If I had the President’s Blackberry, I would send this.
President Obama,
On Wednesday you reversed your administration’s promise to finally release pictures of detainee abuse.
The release of the photos was won by ACLU lawyers who have fought to bring to light the full extent of the brutality and torture that U.S. Army and intelligence services have perpetrated against human beings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and at CIA “black sites” around the world. Torture that was sanctioned and effectively legalized under the former administration, and that, if we are to be honest, most Americans knew — or should have known — was being carried out in our names.
Only now is the knowledge starting to give rise to the widespread outrage and calls for accountability that such crimes against humanity deserve. Growing numbers of citizens are demanding the independent investigation and prosecution of the members of the Bush administration responsible for the vitiation of fundamental legal principles like habeas corpus and the flagrant violation of both international and domestic laws against torture. The pundits, hacks and shills who dismiss these calls for investigation and prosecution — integral to any serious definition of accountability — disgrace themselves and their country.
Using Law License to Facilitate Torture Should Result in Disbarment
Using Law License to Facilitate Torture Should Result in Disbarment
Statement Made Upon the Filing of Complaints Seeking Disbarment of Bush-Cheney’s Cadre of Torture Lawyers
My name is Kevin Zeese, I am an attorney licensed to practice law in Washington, DC and before the U.S. Supreme Court. I serve as the executive director of VotersForPeace.US and on the board of Velvet Revolution. Today, we filed complaints with the District of Columbia Bar and with four other states seeking the disbarment of 12 Bush-Cheney torture lawyers. These lawyers misused their license to practice law to provide legal cover for the war crime of torture. This misuse of their license requires the bar association to disbar them or the bar will become complicit in torture.
Complaints have been filed against: John Yoo, Judge Jay Bybee, and Stephen Bradbury who authored the torture memoranda. As well as attorneys who advised, counseled, consulted and supported those memoranda including Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, Michael Chertoff, Alice Fisher, William Haynes II, Douglas Feith, Michael Mukasey, Timothy Flanigan, and David Addington. These detailed complaints, with over 500 pages of supporting exhibits, have been filed with the state bars in the District of Columbia, New York, California, Texas and Pennsylvania, and they seek disciplinary action and disbarment. Copies of the complaints and exhibits are available on-line at DisbarTortureLawyers.com and VotersForPeace.us.
This cadre of torture lawyers colluded to facilitate the abuse and torture of prisoners (detainees) that included, evidence suggests, deaths at overseas U.S. military facilities. Human Rights Watch reports 98 deaths of people in custody of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Making torture even worse in this case is that it was used to try and get information to tie Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda – a relationship that did not exist – as well as information about non-existent weapons of mass destruction in order to justify the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.
via Using Law License to Facilitate Torture Should Result in Disbarment | CommonDreams.org.
The 13 People Who Made Torture Possible
The 13 People Who Made Torture Possible | CommonDreams.org
The Bush administration’s Torture 13. They authorized it, they decided how to implement it, and they crafted the legal fig leaf to justify it.
by Marcy Wheeler
On April 16, the Obama administration released four memos that were used to authorize torture in interrogations during the Bush administration. When President Obama released the memos, he said, “It is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”
Yet 13 key people in the Bush administration cannot claim they relied on the memos from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. Some of the 13 manipulated the federal bureaucracy and the legal process to “preauthorize” torture in the days after 9/11. Others helped implement torture, and still others helped write the memos that provided the Bush administration with a legal fig leaf after torture had already begun.
The Torture 13 exploited the federal bureaucracy to establish a torture regime in two ways. First, they based the enhanced interrogation techniques on techniques used in the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program. The program — which subjects volunteers from the armed services to simulated hostile capture situations — trains servicemen and -women to withstand coercion well enough to avoid making false confessions if captured. Two retired SERE psychologists contracted with the government to “reverse-engineer” these techniques to use in detainee interrogations.
via The 13 People Who Made Torture Possible | CommonDreams.org.
Newly-Disclosed Memo Shows Bush Was Presented With Legal Alternative To Torture Program
Newly-Disclosed Memo Shows Bush Was Presented With Legal Alternative To Torture Program
zelikowA newly-disclosed 2005 memo, authored by then-State Department counselor Philip Zelikow, then-Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, and then-Deputy Assistant Secretary for Detainee Affairs Matthew Waxman, gave President Bush “clear and unequivocal advice encouraging a detainee interrogation system that followed humane practices that adhered to US and international law.” The memo was authored as the Bush administration was seeking a “fresh approach” handling terror detainee and just weeks after the OLC issued its second round of torture memos.
In the memo, the three Bush administration officials argue that the President should appoint a “special board” to “review general U.S. government detainee policy and operations” and “evaluate issues of effectiveness and intelligence value.”
While that review was taking place, the authors recommended that U.S. forces treat detainees in the so-called war on terror as if they were “civilian detainees under the law of war.” “This is the system generally being used by our forces in Iraq. Adopting this interim approach allows us to handle the detainees on a well understood basis that gives our forces clear, unambiguous guidelines for conduct,” they wrote, adding:
Conservatives Express Hope That Their Attacks On Pelosi Will Quiet Calls For Truth Commission
OPS: interesting framing here since a ‘truth commission” is all about cover-up and no accountability. We need an independent prosecutor, investigations and prosecution not another cover-up commission.
Conservatives Express Hope That Their Attacks On Pelosi Will Quiet Calls For Truth Commission
For weeks, conservatives have been launching hypocritical and disingenuous attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) regarding her level of knowledge of the Bush administration’s torture program.
Fox News conservatives are revealing one of the underlying motives for these attacks — to diminish calls for a truth commission on torture. While interviewing Newt Gingrich, and later, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Fox host Neil Cavuto wondered whether “both parties will cease and desist” from investigations:
Is it a potential Mexican standoff? And by that, I mean, Senator, that Democrats feel they have the goods on the prior administration to drag out hearings on what they knew about Iraq and when. Now Republicans have the goods, presumably, on Nancy Pelosi about what she knew about interrogation and when. So to avoid mutual self-destruction, both parties cease and desist.
Last night on Fox, Dick Cheney’s official biographer Stephen Hayes said, “Democrats who have been so enthusiastic about truth commissions have to be stopping and saying, OK, wait a second.” Mort Kondracke chimed in with some advice for the President: “I think Obama really has to get this stuff stopped.” Watch a compilation:
Jon Stewart Nails it again. Obama is going back on his word
May 14, 2009: Moral Kombat
Barack Obama blocks the release of detainee photos, and refuses to intervene in the dismissal of a gay lieutenant.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=227351&title=moral-kombat
Torture as a means to justify war
Torture as a means to justify war
The Politics of Excusing Torture In The Name of National Security
The Politics of Excusing Torture In The Name of National Security
By JOHN W. DEAN
Allow me to share some analysis about the way things work in Washington. President Obama’s flip-flop on his agreement to turn over photographs of detainees being tortured by American soldiers is a message with broad and clear implications. Those who believe that the Obama Administration should expose and prosecute persons who committed war crimes should understand that it is not going to happen the way they would like, or as quickly, because Obama is having internal battles as well. His pullback is not occurring because he fears that Republicans will attack him (he knows they will); rather it is occurring because he needs the national security community behind him, and they fear they will be further embarrassed and humiliated if more information is revealed.
According to The Washington Post, President Obama told White House lawyers he does not “feel comfortable” releasing the photos because of the reaction they could cause against U.S. troops, and because “he believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court,” in responding to the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. [Emphasis added.]
Even before looking closely at Obama’s change of mind, I understood immediately what had taken place, as soon as I heard the report on the radio. President Obama was, in fact, speaking for the national security bureaucracy in announcing his change of mind. I knew it would happen at some point. Although his first instinct had been to release the pictures, as he had released the new Justice Department torture memos, it was clear he had been turned around, and I was certain it was the work of the national security bureaucracy.
My hunch was confirmed by the AP report, which explained, “American commanders in the war zones expressed deep concern about fresh damage the photos might do, especially as the U.S. tries to wind down the Iraq war and step up operations against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan.” How do the commanders know this to be the case? How do they know that it is the not the case that, to the contrary, more people around the world might admire us for openly correcting past mistakes? In fact, you can be certain “the commanders” do not truly know that the photos will harm America’s image, but they do know how to protect the national security bureaucracy, after having risen to its top ranks. This is exactly what is going on here, and the explanation was pure bureaucratic excuse-making.
via The Politics of Excusing Torture In The Name of National Security.
If We’re Going to Reveal More Memos. . . .
If We’re Going to Reveal More Memos. . . . -VetVoice::
by: Major Matthew
then I suggest they also release statistics from Iraq showing the number of foreign fighters that were recruited because of our policy of torture and abuse. It was tracked.
Former VP Dick Cheney has requested the release of additional memos showing that torture and abuse saved American lives by preventing terrorist attacks. If the Obama Administration decides to release these memos, then I suggest they also release statistics from Iraq showing the number of foreign fighters that were recruited because of our policy of torture and abuse. It was tracked. I know because I saw the slides and because I heard captured foreign fighters state this day in and day out. The government can also release the statistics that show that 90% of suicide bombers in Iraq were these same foreign fighters. These foreign fighters killed hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers.
After these revelations, Americans can judge whether or not a policy of torture and abuse kept us safe. Unfortunately, we’ll never be able to evaluate the damage that was done to past or future interrogations. As I experienced firsthand, detainees were less likely to cooperate when they viewed us as hypocrites. We can’t establish the trust that is required to convince a detainee to cooperate unless we live up to the principles that we preach.
Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama
Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama
The ‘Black Shirts’ of Guantanamo routinely terrorize prisoners, breaking bones, gouging eyes, squeezing testicles, and ‘dousing’ them with chemicals.
As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.
More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.
We tortured to justify war
We tortured to justify war | Salon
Dick Cheney keeps saying “enhanced interrogation” was used to stop imminent attacks, but evidence is mounting that the real reason was to invent evidence linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaida.
By Joe Conason
The single most pertinent question that Dick Cheney is never asked — at least not by the admiring interviewers he has encountered so far — is whether he, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush used torture to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. As he tours television studios, radio stations and conservative think tanks, the former vice-president hopes to persuade America that only waterboarding kept us safe for seven years.
Yet evidence is mounting that under Cheney’s direction, “enhanced interrogation” was not used exclusively to prevent imminent acts of terror or collect actionable intelligence — the aims that he constantly emphasizes — but to invent evidence that would link al-Qaida with Saddam Hussein and connect the late Iraqi dictator to the 9/11 attacks.
In one report after another, from journalists, former administration officials and Senate investigators, the same theme continues to emerge: Whenever a prisoner believed to possess any knowledge of al-Qaida’s operations or Iraqi intelligence came into American custody, CIA interrogators felt intense pressure from the Bush White House to produce evidence of an Iraq-Qaida relationship (which contradicted everything that U.S. intelligence and other experts knew about the enmity between Saddam’s Baath Party and Osama bin Laden’s jihadists). Indeed, the futile quest for proof of that connection is the common thread running through the gruesome stories of torture from the Guantánamo detainee camp to Egyptian prisons to the CIA’s black sites in Thailand and elsewhere.
New Afghanistan General Approves Torture?
OPS: He’s also been linked to the Pat Tillman murder
Acts of Conscience – Esquire
As President Obama taps Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal to run the Afghan war, do these revelations, divulged to Esquire at great personal risk by an elite Army interrogator two and a half years ago, imply the new commander’s aiding and abetting of torture?
Originally published in the August 2006 issue
“No meaningful insistence on accountability has been discernible from either the Gonzales Justice Department or the Rumsfeld Defense Department. It has been left to human-rights organizations to piece together the alarming history of the CIA and U. S. Army’s illegal descent into torture.”
—BRIGADIER GENERAL DAVID R. IRVINE (RET.)
The rented car blasts down the Strom Thurmond Highway toward Georgia, taking Marc Garlasco to his meeting with the Army interrogator. Balmy air pours in the window.
It is spring. Garlasco has one hand on the wheel, light glinting off his wraparound mirrored sunglasses. He is talking about his wife and kids as he passes through countryside so brimming with green life that it’s strange and almost obscene to imagine his goal.
via Stanley McChrystal on Torture – New Afghanistan General Approves Torture? – Esquire.
My Written Testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Torture Memos
My Written Testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Torture Memos
by: MajorMatthew
Wed May 13, 2009 at 19:22:43 PM EDT
(This is a guest post from Matthew Alexander. – promoted by Brandon Friedman)
This is my full testimony to the Committee. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse read a portion of this statement near the end of the hearing. I also recommend the reading of Ali Soufan’s testimony, available on the Senate Judiciary Committee website.
Chairman Leahy and Esteemed Members of the Committee,
Thank you for the opportunity to address the Committee on the issue of interrogation. I especially thank Senator Sheldon Whitehouse for his invitation to submit this written testimony.
I submit this testimony as a private citizen and not as an official representative of the United States Air Force or as a representative of the Department of Defense. I am currently still in the Air Force Reserves. I have served for seventeen years in the United States Air Force and Air Force Reserves and have completed five combat deployments to three wars. I feel that nothing less than our national soul is at stake in the debate concerning the torture and abuse of prisoners.
In 2006, I deployed to Iraq as an interrogator at the bequest of the Army. Prior to my deployment I was a special agent for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, both on Active Duty and in the Reserves. Before I was a special agent, I was a special operations helicopter pilot. I’ve served in the conflicts in Bosnia, Kosovo, Colombia, and Iraq.
As an interrogator in Iraq, I conducted more than 300 interrogations and supervised more than 1,000. I led the interrogations team that located Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaida in Iraq, and one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation. At the time that we killed Zarqawi, he was the number one priority for the United States military, higher than Osama Bin Laden.
I strongly oppose the use of torture or abuse as interrogation methods for both pragmatic and moral reasons.
MajorMatthew :: My Written Testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Torture Memos
via VetVoice:: My Written Testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Torture Memos.
Soufan: CIA torture actually hindered our intelligence gathering
Soufan: CIA torture actually hindered our intelligence gathering
An FBI agent testifies that an al-Qaida prisoner provided useful intelligence until the CIA got rough — and casts doubt on Bush’s statements about the effectiveness of harsh interrogations.
May 14, 2009 | WASHINGTON — The testimony of a key witness at a Senate hearing Wednesday raised serious questions about the truthfulness of former President George W. Bush’s own personal defense of the CIA’s brutal interrogation program. Former FBI agent Ali Soufan also indicated that the harsh interrogation techniques may actually have hindered the collection of intelligence, causing a high-value prisoner to stop cooperating.
In the first congressional hearing on torture since the release of Bush administration memos that provided the legal justification for torture, Soufan told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the CIA’s abusive techniques were “ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaida.” According to Soufan, his own nonviolent interrogation of an al-Qaida suspect was quickly yielding valuable, actionable intelligence — until the CIA intervened.
Soufan was with the FBI on March 28, 2002, when the United States captured its first suspected al-Qaida operative after 9/11, a man named Abu Zubaydah, held at a secret location overseas. Soufan had investigated terrorism cases dating back to the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, and he was one of the first experts called after Zubaydah’s capture.
via Soufan: CIA torture actually hindered our intelligence gathering | Salon News.
The photos America doesn’t want seen
The photos America doesn’t want seen -
MORE photographs have been leaked of Iraqi citizens tortured by US soldiers at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad.
Tonight the SBS Dateline program plans to broadcast about 60 previously unpublished photographs that the US Government has been fighting to keep secret in a court case with the American Civil Liberties Union.
Although a US judge last year granted the union access to the photographs following a freedom-of-information request, the US Administration has appealed against the decision on the grounds their release would fuel anti-American sentiment.
Some of the photos are similar to those published in 2004, others are different. They include photographs of six corpses, although the circumstances of their deaths are not clear. There are also pictures of what appear to be burns and wounds from shotgun pellets.
The executive producer of Dateline, Mike Carey, said he was showing the pictures leaked to his program because it was important people understood what had happened at Abu Ghraib.
more article at link – also see
- Photos: More snaps from Abu Ghraib
via The photos America doesn’t want seen – World – smh.com.au.
Leahy: Bybee refused to appear before Judiciary subcommittee hearing on torture memos.
Leahy: Bybee refused to appear before Judiciary subcommittee hearing on torture memos.
impeachbybee.jpgLast month, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) invited Judge Jay Bybee to testify in front of a subcommittee about his “views” regarding torture and his “role” in drafting the torture memos. The Los Angeles Times subsequently reported that Bybee had chosen to ignore Leahy’s request. Today, however, in a statement during the hearing, Leahy said that Bybee had specifically refused to appear:
Since Judge Bybee, through his lawyers, has declined to testify before the Committee at this time about his role in the drafting and authorization of memoranda from the Office of Legal Counsel that permitted torture, I can only presume that he has no exonerating information to provide. Judge Bybee must know that the presumption in our civil law is that when a person fails to come forward with information in his possession that is relevant to a matter, it is presumed to be because the information is negative and not helpful to his cause.
Testifying voluntary before the Judiciary Committee about these now-public memoranda is one way in which Judge Bybee could have helped complete the record of what happened and why but he refused. This is especially inappropriate given that Judge Bybee has hardly maintained silence about these matters.
Mike Malloy: “Sadistic . . . violent . . . inhuman”
“Sadistic . . . violent . . . inhuman”
They must be horrific. So violent, in fact, so obscene, so counter to even the basic tenets of human decency that President Barack Obama sought today to block the release of hundreds of photos showing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan being abused, violated, tortured. He ordered this reversal of his position – he had been in favor of the decision to release this further evidence of war crimes committed under orders from George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – after military commanders warned that the images could inflame anti-American sentiment and endanger U.S. troops.
But, it is far worse than that. The reality is this: Anti-American sentiment could not be more “inflamed” than it already is in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Our policy of indiscriminate bombing after the location of a “target” has been determined has caused the deaths of hundreds of men, women and children in both Pakistan and Afghanistan. Our policies of providing weapons of terror – such as white phosphorous, concussion bombs, advanced jet fighters, massive tanks bristling with the power to annihilate anything in its path, explosives packed in cases made of depleted uranium – to be used by Israel against an utterly defenseless Palestinian population is known throughout the Middle East, throughout the world, except, of course, here in the U.S.
No, the release of the photos and videos in question would do more than “inflame anti-American sentiment and endanger U.S. troops.” If we are to believe reports that began circulating four years ago, reports from investigative journalists such as Seymour Hersh, their release would unleash a wave of anti-American hatred that would endanger the lives of not just U.S. soldiers, but the lives of all Americans, civilians as well as military personnel. Hersh, who helped uncover the scandal, said in a speech before an ACLU convention: “Some of the worse that happened that you don’t know about, ok? Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men … . The women were passing messages saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened. Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They [the Bush Crime Family] are in total terror it’s going to come out.”
Torture Memos ‘An Ethical Train Wreck,’ Not Drafted in ‘Good Faith
Torture Memos ‘An Ethical Train Wreck,’ Not Drafted in ‘Good Faith – By William Fisher
“An ethical train wreck” was the phrase used by one witness to describe the legal reasoning behind the Justice Department’s recently released memos justifying the use of waterboarding and other forms of “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
The phrase came during the testimony of David Luban, a law professor at Georgetown University, before a panel on administrative oversight and the courts subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee today.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, chaired the hearing. Whitehouse said the administration of former President George W. Bush inundated the American public in a “near avalanche of falsehood” on the subject of detainee treatment.
“We were told that waterboarding was determined to be legal, but were not told how badly the law was ignored, bastardized and manipulated by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel nor were we told how furiously government and military lawyers rejected the defective OLC opinions,” Whitehouse said.
The panel also heard from Bush-era State Department counselor Philip Zelikow, who testified that he unsuccessfully dissented from the Justice Department view that harsh interrogation practices were either legal or moral.
He told the subcommittee – the first congressional panel to address allegations of torture — that Bush administration officials engaged in a “collective failure” on detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.
via Torture Memos ‘An Ethical Train Wreck,’ Not Drafted in ‘Good Faith.
Obama reverses course on alleged prison abuse photos
BF: Obama WH Stops Release of Hundreds Bush-Era Torture and Abuse Photos. As a Result, More Bushevik War Crimes Will Not See the Light of Day. BuzzFlash Readers, Remember Detainees were More Than Tortured; Many Were Murdered. This is Not an Issue of “Military Morale”: It is a Matter of Justice.
Obama reverses course on alleged prison abuse photos
President Obama has ordered government lawyers to object to the planned release of additional detainee photos, the White House said Wednesday
The Defense Department was set to release hundreds of photographs showing alleged abuse of prisoners in detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“The president was concerned about harm to the troops,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Wednesday afternoon. “The president, as you all know, met with his legal team last week because he did not feel comfortable with the release of the photos.”
Gibbs added, “the president reflected on this case and believes that they have the potential to pose harm to the troops. … Nothing is added by the release of the photos.”
via Obama reverses course on alleged prison abuse photos – CNN.com.
Live video: Senate hearing on torture
Live video: Senate hearing on torture - Raw Story »
“Former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow will tell a Senate panel this morning that Bush administration officials engaged in a ‘collective failure’ on detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists, according to testimony submitted in advance of the first congressional hearing to address allegations of torture,” the Washington Post reports.
According to his advance testimony, which was embargoed until the scheduled start of the 10 a.m. hearing, Zelikow will say that the memo is undergoing declassification review. He says that unnamed administration officials sought to collect copies and destroy them in early 2006, but that they were unsuccessful.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who will lead this morning’s hearing of the Judiciary Committee’s panel on administrative oversight and the courts, said much of the story remains classified, muddled by ideology, or unknown.
In a prepared statement he will deliver this morning, Whitehouse decries a “near avalanche of falsehood” on the subject of detainee treatment that he says has been “intensely frustrating” to witness.
“We were told that waterboarding was determined to be legal, but were not told how badly the law was ignored, bastardized and manipulated by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel nor were we told how furiously government and military lawyers rejected the defective OLC opinions,” Whitehouse says in his statement.
This live video feed is from MSNBC…..
Conservatives Outraged Over Release Of Torture Photos, But Not Over Actual Torture
Conservatives Outraged Over Release Of Torture Photos, But Not Over Actual Torture - Think Progress »
On April 23, the Obama administration announced it would release hundreds of photos of detainee interrogation, obeying a court order from a lawsuit filed by the ACLU. Predictably, conservatives furious with the Obama administration’s attempt at greater transparency denounced the move. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) wrote to President Obama asking him not to release the photos because they could inflame potential terrorists:
The release of these old photographs of past behavior that has now clearly been prohibited will serve no public good, but will empower al-Qaeda propaganda operations, hurt our country’s image, and endanger our men and women in uniform. We know that many terrorists captured in Iraq have told American interrogators that one of the reasons they decided to join the violent jihadist war against America was what they saw on Al-Qaeda videos of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib,” wrote Graham and Lieberman.
via Think Progress » Conservatives Outraged Over Release Of Torture Photos, But Not Over Actual Torture.
Bush Failure To Disclose Waterboarding Appears To Violate Law
Bush Failure To Disclose Waterboarding Appears To Violate Law
The furor over when and whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefed about the use of waterboarding has distracted attention from what is, perhaps, a far more problematic revelation regarding the Bush administration’s interrogation of suspected terrorists.
According to the testimony of two high-ranking Democrats and recently declassified CIA and Justice Department documents, the Bush White House failed to disclose the use of waterboarding until roughly half a year after it was first deployed. Other writers — notably Marcy Wheeler — have picked up on this timeline. But it is worth restating and highlighting again because, if accurate, it appears to constitute a violation of law by the former White House.
As documented by the Congressional Research Service, the President is required to ensure “that the congressional intelligence committees are kept ‘fully and currently informed’ of U.S. intelligence activities, including any ’significant anticipated intelligence activity.’” The basis of this is the 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act, which places a statutory obligation on the President to not just keep relevant committees “fully and currently informed” but to disclose “any significant anticipated intelligence activity.”
via Bush Failure To Disclose Waterboarding Appears To Violate Law.
Obama administration threatens Britain to keep torture evidence concealed
Obama administration threatens Britain to keep torture evidence concealed - Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com
Ever since he was released from Guantanamo in February after six years of due-process-less detention and brutal torture, Binyam Mohamed has been attempting to obtain justice for what was done to him. But his torturers have been continuously protected, and Mohamed’s quest for a day in court repeatedly thwarted, by one individual: Barack Obama. Today, there is new and graphic evidence of just how far the Obama administration is going to prevent evidence of the Bush administration’s torture program from becoming public.
In February, Obama’s DOJ demanded dismissal of Mohamed’s lawsuit against the company which helped “render” him to be tortured on the ground that national security would be harmed if the lawsuit continued. Then, after a British High Court ruled that there was credible evidence that Mohamed was subjected to brutal torture and was entitled to obtain evidence in the possession of the British government which detailed the CIA’s treatment of Mohamed, and after a formal police inquiry began into allegations that British agents collaborated in his torture, the British government cited threats from the U.S. government that it would no longer engage in intelligence-sharing with Britain — i.e., it would no longer pass on information about terrorist threats aimed at British citizens — if the British court disclosed the facts of Mohamed’s torture.
As I wrote about in February, those threats from the U.S. caused the British High Court to reverse itself and rule that, in light of these threats from the U.S., it would keep seven paragraphs detailing Mohamed’s torture concealed. From the British court’s ruling:
FBI Whistleblower Testimony: Gonzales Imposed Brutal Interrogation Tactics
FBI Whistleblower Testimony: Gonzales Imposed Brutal Interrogation Tactics - ABC News
Ali Soufan Also To Testify CIA Torture Program Architect Was Unqualified
As President Bush’s top lawyer, Alberto Gonzales pressed counterterror officials to use brutal interrogation techniques on terror suspect Abu Zubaydah in 2002, even when those techniques hindered Zubaydah’s cooperation, a former FBI agent who was present is expected to testify Wednesday before Congress.
via FBI Whistleblower Testimony: Gonzales Imposed Brutal Interrogation Tactics – ABC News.
Q & A Session on Bad Advice: Bush’s Lawyers In The War On Terror
Q & A Session on Bad Advice: Bush’s Lawyers In The War On Terror
By JOHN W. DEAN
Harold Bruff is a former U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attorney; currently, he is a professor of law (and former Dean) at the University of Colorado (Boulder) Law School. In his new book, Bad Advice: Bush’s Lawyers In The War On Terror, Bruff has taken a critical look at the legal advice provided to President Bush and Vice President Cheney to deal with their “war on terror.” His findings, as reported in the book, are not pretty. (I discovered Professor Bruff’s book when browsing the University of Kansas Press catalogue. The Press is the future publisher of a work-in-progress that I am co-authoring with a young historian about the Watergate cover-up trial.)
Part I of Bad Advice examines the role of lawyers who are advising presidents. This material is timeless. Part II looks at the post-9/11 legal advice Bush was given regarding dealing with terrorists and terrorism. In particular, it addresses advice on matters such as the legality of warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency, the indefinite detention of enemy combatants, evading the Geneva Conventions, conducting military (not civilian) trials of detainees, and employing aggressive interrogation techniques. This material could not be timelier.
Given Harold Bruff’s considerable experience and professional credentials, not to mention the objectivity and candor of his analysis, his findings are disquieting to say the least. Rather than review his book, however, I thought it might be more interesting to seek answers from him to a few of the questions that had occurred to me when I was reading the book. The University of Kansas Press arranged for me to contact Professor Bruff, and our exchange went as follows:
via Q & A Session on Bad Advice: Bush’s Lawyers In The War On Terror.
Pelosi Stayed Silent On Torture in ‘03 Because ‘It Was Difficult Politically’
OPS: Pelosi must go too
Pelosi: Torture Protest Improper in ‘03 – | Common Dreams
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi learned in early 2003 that the Bush administration was waterboarding terror detainees but didn’t protest directly out of respect for “appropriate” legislative channels, a person familiar with the situation said Monday
The Pelosi camp’s version of events is intended to answer two key questions posed by her critics: When, precisely, did she first learn about waterboarding? And why didn’t she do more to stop it?
Pelosi has disputed a CIA document, released last week, that shows she was briefed in September 2002 on the “particular” interrogation techniques the United States had used on Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah. Pelosi has said she was told then only that the Bush administration was considering using certain techniques in the future – and that it had the legal authority to do so.
But there’s no dispute that on Feb. 4, 2003 – five months after Pelosi’s September meeting – CIA officials briefed Pelosi aide Michael Sheehy and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, on the specific techniques that had been used on Zubaydah – including waterboarding.
via Pelosi: Torture Protest Improper in ‘03 | CommonDreams.org.
Hersh: Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on tape
Hersh: Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on tape – - Salon.com
After Donald Rumsfeld testified on the Hill about Abu Ghraib in May, there was talk of more photos and video in the Pentagon’s custody more horrific than anything made public so far. “If these are released to the public, obviously it’s going to make matters worse,” Rumsfeld said. Since then, the Washington Post has disclosed some new details and images of abuse at the prison. But if Seymour Hersh is right, it all gets much worse.
Hersh gave a speech last week to the ACLU making the charge that children were sodomized in front of women in the prison, and the Pentagon has tape of it. The speech was first reported in a New York Sun story last week, which was in turn posted on Jim Romenesko’s media blog, and now EdCone.com and other blogs are linking to the video. We transcribed the critical section here (it starts at about 1:31:00 into the ACLU video.) At the start of the transcript here, you can see how Hersh was struggling over what he should say:
“Debating about it, ummm … Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”
via Hersh: Children sodomized at Abu Ghraib, on tape – War Room – Salon.com.
REPORT: Why Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Failed
REPORT: Why Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Failed – Think Progress »
Yesterday, the Washington Post published an article on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Bush-era interrogation techniques. Greg Sargent flagged two paragraphs of the story revealing that the White House intends to release a 2004 CIA report that casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of Bush’s torture program:
Government officials familiar with the CIA’s early interrogations say the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses is contained in the “top secret” May 7, 2004, inspector general report, based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents. The full report remains closely held, although White House officials have told political allies that they intend to declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month’s release of the Justice Department’s interrogation memos. [...]
Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that “it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks,” according to the Justice Department’s declassified summary of it.
via Think Progress » REPORT: Why Bush’s ‘Enhanced Interrogation’ Program Failed.
Three Worst Reasons to Delay Putting Cheney in Prison
Three Worst Reasons to Delay Putting Cheney in Prison
by David Swanson
#1: Cheney says that he and Bush ordered torture but did nothing wrong.
On Sunday, Cheney said: “The fact of the matter is that these [torture] techniques that we’re talking about are used on our own people. In the SERE program that in effect trains our people with respect to capture and evasion and so forth, and escape, a lot of them go through these same exact procedures.”
If this were true, participants in the SERE program would be kidnapped and tortured by people willing to kill them. They would be waterboarded believing they might be drowned. This would be done upwards of 100 times. They would be hung by their wrists, beaten, electroshocked, deprived of sleep, stripped naked and exposed to cold, attacked by dogs, slammed against walls, kept in isolation, and in many cases killed, in many other cases driven insane.
“Once we [waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times] he produced vast quantities of invaluable information about al Qaeda,” Cheney said, while failing in multiple interviews to cite a single example of such information that has not already been debunked. The same people fall for this sort of claim as fell for this one: “Iraq continues to conceal quantities, vast quantities, of highly lethal material and weapons to deliver it.” (Colin Powell, January, 2003). In both cases, the supposed evidence is classified. In both cases, the existence of that evidence and truth of the claim would do absolutely nothing to legalize the action being defended, be it aggressive war or torture.
#2: Harry Reid said last week that if we wait six more months for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report to whitewash the torture story, it’ll be easier then to avoid legally required prosecutions of people like Cheney.
White House To Declassify “Holy Grail” Torture Report That Could Undercut Cheney
White House To Declassify “Holy Grail” Torture Report That Could Undercut Cheney
There’s a big piece of news about Dick Cheney and torture buried toward the end of this big Washington Post piece about the torture wars.
Specifically: The White House has decided to declassify and release a classified 2004 CIA report about the torture program that is reported to have found no proof that torture foiled any terror plots on American soil — directly contradicting Cheney’s claims. The paper cites “allies” of the White House as a source.
Dem Congressional staffers tell me this report is the “holy grail,” because it is expected to detail torture in unprecedented detail and to cast doubt on the claim that torture works — and its release will almost certainly trigger howls of protest from conservatives. Tellingly, neither the CIA nor the White House knocked down the story in response to my questions, with spokespeople for both declining comment. Here’s the key nugget from the Post piece:
Government officials familiar with the CIA’s early interrogations say the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses is contained in the “top secret” May 7, 2004, inspector general report, based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents. The full report remains closely held, although White House officials have told political allies that they intend to declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month’s release of the Justice Department’s interrogation memos…
Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that “it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks,” according to the Justice Department’s declassified summary of it.
via White House To Declassify “Holy Grail” Torture Report That Could Undercut Cheney | The Plum Line.
Prosecuting Torture: Is Time Really Running Out?
Prosecuting Torture: Is Time Really Running Out?
“My ship Liberty sailed away on a bloody red horizon
The groundskeeper opened the gates and let the wild dogs run.”
- Bruce Springsteen, “Livin’ in the Future”
When the highest officials of our nation flung open the gates of law and morality and let the wild dogs of torture run, they set in motion a constellation of potentially-indictable federal crimes. While I do not think a grand jury investigation into those violations should be publicly initiated right now, (for strategic reasons discussed here), I do agree entirely with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse that the Attorney General must not rule out prosecutions for these violations. In the May 4, 2009, National Law Journal, the Democrat from Rhode Island writes: “The factual record … has not been fully developed and reviewed – and no good prosecutor would make a final determination until all the facts are in.” As usual, the former US Attorney has it exactly right. No responsible prosecutor would do that and, indeed, as long as the record is unfolding, the Attorney General wouldn’t be able to render any meaningful final “verdict” of no prosecution even if he wanted to. (And, certainly, no potential defendant could hold him to it.) So – regardless of what the prognosis for prosecution appears to be on any given day – it is critical to keep those revelations coming, as well as to support proposals for a non-partisan commission that will publicly air all the facts, and, most important, not give up on eventual indictments.
So Many Crimes, but How Much Time?
via t r u t h o u t | Prosecuting Torture: Is Time Really Running Out?.
Silence on torture troubling
Silence on torture troubling
At long last, a prominent Christian conservative has called waterboarding what it is: torture. Last week, Richard Land, an official with the Southern Baptist Convention, said the practice is unethical and “violates everything we stand for.”
“There are some things you should never do to another human being, no matter how horrific the things they have done. If you do so, you demean yourself to their level,” said Land, president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
His comments, though belated, are welcome. He breaks a telling silence about torture among the most politically active leaders of the religious right, who had a tendency to endorse all decisions and embrace all practices of former President Bush. Indeed, Land had nothing to say about waterboarding when Bush was still in office, though many reports confirmed the administration’s use of the practice years ago.
Cheney May Be Willing To Testify Under Oath About Torture Program
OPS: Why the hell does he have to be ‘willing’ ? Just do it.
Cheney May Be Willing To Testify Under Oath About Torture Program
Today on CBS’s Face the Nation, Vice President Cheney vigorously defended the Bush administration’s torture policies and his belief that by rejecting them, President Obama is raising “the risk to the American people of another attack.” Cheney said that the Bush administration’s interrogation policies will one day be viewed as “one of the great success stories of American intelligence.”
When host Bob Schieffer asked Cheney whether he would be willing to testify to Congress under oath, Cheney initially hedged, but then indicated that he would be willing to do so:
SCHIEFFER: Would you go back and talk to the Congress?
CHENEY: Certainly. I’ve made it very clear that I feel very strongly that what we did here was exactly the right thing to do. And if I don’t speak out, then where do we find ourselves, Bob? Then the critics have free run, and there isn’t anybody there on the other side to tell the truth. So it’s important — it’s important that we…
via Think Progress » Cheney May Be Willing To Testify Under Oath About Torture Program.
Senators Urge Obama to Block Release of New Detainee Abuse Photos
OPS: This atrocity was done in our name, by our ‘elected’ officials and with our tax dollars. We have a right and an obligation to see these photos.
Senators Urge Obama to Block Release of New Detainee Abuse Photos
Civil libertarians are condemning a call by two influential U.S. senators for the White House to block the impending release of photographs showing detainees being abused by U.S. military personnel at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at other American detention facilities in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The plea to intervene to stop the expected May 28 release of the photos came in a letter Thursday to President Barack Obama from Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham.
“The release of these old photographs of past behavior that has now been clearly prohibited will serve no public good, but will empower al-Qaeda propaganda operations, hurt our country’s image, and endanger our men and women in uniform,” the Senators wrote.
Release of the photos is expected in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“We urge you in the strongest possible terms to fight the release of these old pictures of detainees in the war on terror, including appealing the decision of the Second Circuit in the ACLU lawsuit to the Supreme Court and pursuing all legal options to prevent the public disclosure of these pictures,” the senators wrote.
via Senators Urge Obama to Block Release of New Detainee Abuse Photos.
Fort Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII
“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,”
Fort Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII
For six decades, they held their silence.
The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.
When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.
Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.
“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.
via Fort Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII – washingtonpost.com.
CIA terror suspects ‘kept awake for 11 days’
OPS: Personally, I start hallucinating after about 30 hours without sleep
CIA terror suspects ‘kept awake for 11 days’
More than 25 of the CIA’s war-on-terror prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation for as long as 11 days at a time during the administration of former president George Bush, according to The Los Angeles Times.
At one stage during the war on terror, the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to keep prisoners awake for as long as 11 days, the Times reported, citing memoranda made public by the Justice department last month.
The limit was later reduced to just over a week, the report stated.
Sleep deprivation was one of the most important elements in the CIA’s interrogation programme, seen as more effective than more violent techniques used to help break the will of suspects.
via CIA terror suspects ‘kept awake for 11 days’ – Times Online.
Turley to Obama: ‘Do the right thing,’ prosecute torture
Turley to Obama: ‘Do the right thing,’ prosecute torture
Constitutional attorney Jonathan Turley wants the Obama administration to “do the right thing” by appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s torture program.
“I hope, at a minimum, President Obama will end this just endless performance of Hamlet on the Potomac, debating whether a special prosecutor will be appointed, whether these crimes will be investigated, and do the right thing,” he said on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show Thursday night. “Just appoint a special prosecutor and let the chips land where they may.”
Judge Jay Bybee, who co-authored memos that authorized the Bush administration’s torture program, is trying to reach out and lobby members of the Nevada delegation in hopes that he won’t be disbarred from his seat on the bench, Maddow said.
Bybee, who has offices in Las Vegas, is one of several former Bush administration attorneys who are harshly criticized by an internal Justice Department report for their “deeply flawed” and “sloppily reasoned” legal analysis in approving torture.
The memo, which has not yet been released, is rumored to recommend disbarment for Bybee and John Yoo, another Bush administration attorney heavily involved in producing the so-called “torture memos.”
via Raw Story » Turley to Obama: ‘Do the right thing,’ prosecute torture.
CIA Admits That Info About Torture Briefings For Dems May Not Be Accurate | The Plum Line
CIA Admits That Info About Torture Briefings For Dems May Not Be Accurate
As I noted below, newly released documents appear to show that according to the CIA, officials briefed Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats back in 2002 about the use of torture techniques on terror suspects.
But a letter that accompanied these documents, written by the head of the CIA, appears to clearly concede that the information in the docs about who was briefed and when may not be accurate or reliable.
Republicans are pointing to the documents — which were produced by the CIA and the Director of National Intelligence, and sent to select members of Congress — to charge that Pelosi and other Dems have been lying about what they knew about waterboarding and when.
But the docs were accompanied by a letter from CIA chief Leon Panetta that appears to suggest the CIA can’t promise that the info is right. The letter was sent along with the documents to GOP Rep Pete Hoekstra, a leading critic of Dems on torture, and Dem Rep Silvestre Reyes, the chairman of the intelligence committee.
I’ve obtained the letter, and a PDF is right here. This is the key part (click to enlarge):
Emphasis mine. “MFR” apparently refers to “memorandum for the record.”
As you can see, this letter says that the info about briefings is taken from notes based on the “best recollections” of those who were there, adding:
In the end, you and the Committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened.
via CIA Admits That Info About Torture Briefings For Dems May Not Be Accurate | The Plum Line.
What Did Pelosi Know About Torture And What Could She Have Done About It?
What Did Pelosi Know About Torture And What Could She Have Done About It?
ABC News reported last night that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was “was briefed on the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on terrorist suspect Abu Zubaydah in September 2002,” according to a documents prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The documents appear to contradict Pelosi’s previous claims that she did not know that the Bush administration had employed the “enhanced interrogation techniques” authorized by the Office of Legal Counsel.
In a February 25 interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Pelosi explained what she knew about the Bush administration’s use of torture, saying that she had been briefed but was not told that the techniques had been used:
PELOSI: They did not brief us that these enhanced interrogations were taking place. They were talking about an array of interrogations that they might have at their disposal. … We were never told they were being used. … The inference to be drawn from what they told us was that these are things that we think could be legal. … But they never told us that they were being used.
Watch it:
via Think Progress » What Did Pelosi Know About Torture And What Could She Have Done About It?.
Holder says he approved Clinton-era renditions
Holder says he approved Clinton-era renditions
Under fire from Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder revealed that he had approved of rendition — essentially, legalized kidnapping — apparently more than once during his tenure as President Bill Clinton’s deputy attorney general.
Cautioning Holder that any potential investigation into the Bush administration’s torture program could result in Democrats being roped in, “Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Richard Shelby of Alabama pressed Holder on the CIA’s ‘rendition’ program that moved terrorism suspects from one country to another,” reported Domenico Montanaro with MSNBC.
“Didn’t that happen during the Clinton administration?
“Yes, Holder said.
“‘How many did you approve?’ they asked.
“Holder said he’d check the record.”
Despite frequent condemnation of the practice around the world, rendition — the secret capture, transportation and detention of suspected terrorists to foreign prisons in countries that cooperate with the U.S. — remains in the CIA’s playbook, thanks to a Jan. 22 executive order issued by President Obama.
via Raw Story » Holder says he approved Clinton-era renditions.
At least 19 Democrats were briefed on Bush torture methods by 2006, document shows
Democrats were routinely briefed on Bush torture techniques, document shows
The CIA has leaked a devastating document detailing the dates and explicit details of secret Congressional briefings in which members of Congress were told of the Bush administration’s torture techniques and when they had been used.
The document is explicit (PDF here). Most damningly, perhaps, is its description of a meeting held between CIA staff and then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss and now-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which shows that Pelosi was briefed on the Bush Administration’s torture techniques in 2002 — even though she’s publicly said she was never told about the use of waterboarding.
Equally striking, however, is the volume of the briefings that have been conducted on the CIA’s interrogation practices since 2002. The document runs ten pages, with up to four briefings a page.
Briefings given to Democrats are of particular significance because the party has been the most vocal about the Bush Administration’s torture practices. Apparently, however, they had known about the practices for years. At least 19 Democrats were briefed about the techniques in detail by end of 2006.
via Raw Story » Democrats were routinely briefed on Bush torture techniques, document shows.
Cheney: Spanish torture probe ‘abhorrent’
OPS: You can bet it is – to him….. 
Cheney: Spanish torture probe ‘abhorrent’
Former Vice President Dick Cheney continued his excuses-for-torture tour today with an interview on a radio station in Fargo.
Perhaps needless to say, he’s not exactly praising the new administration.
“There are two documents in particular that I personally have read and know about that are still classified in that National Archives,” Cheney said. ”But I’ve asked that they be de-classified; I made that request over a month ago on March 31st. What those documents show is the success, especially of the interrogation program in terms of what it produced by way of intelligence that let us track down members of Al-Qaeda and disrupt their plans and plots to strike the United States. It’s all there in black and white…It demonstrates conclusively the worth of those programs. As I say, I’ve asked the administration to de-classify them and so far they have not.”
[...]
He warned that [an investigation] would have future consequences.
“Anybody who sees that kind of thing happen is going to pull their head in, and they’ll be reluctant to take responsibility for anything,” he said, adding, “I hear this talk that there is going to be some kind of foreign prosecution of our guys, I just think that’s abhorrent, and I think they ought to do everything they can to fight that.”
Of course, Cheney’s position that torture “works” has been completely discredited.
via The Raw Story » Cheney: Spanish torture probe ‘abhorrent’.
Intelligence Report: Pelosi Briefed on Use of Interrogation Tactics in Sept. ’02
OPS: It’s time to clean House (and Senate)
Intelligence Report: Pelosi Briefed on Use of Interrogation Tactics in Sept. ’02
ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on terrorist suspect Abu Zubaydah in September 2002, according to a report prepared by the Director of National Intelligence’s office and obtained by ABC News.
The report, submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee and other Capitol Hill officials Wednesday, appears to contradict Pelosi’s statement last month that she was never told about the use of waterboarding or other special interrogation tactics. Instead, she has said, she was told only that the Bush administration had legal opinions that would have supported the use of such techniques.
The report details a Sept. 4, 2002 meeting between intelligence officials and Pelosi, then-House intelligence committee chairman Porter Goss, and two aides. At the time, Pelosi was the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.
via Intelligence Report: Pelosi Briefed on Use of Interrogation Tactics in Sept. ’02 – The Note.
Cheney: “Mistake” For GOP To “Moderate,” Glad That Detainees Were Waterboarded
OPS: the only way to stop this now and prevent it in the future is for this clown, and his accomplices, to go down – hard
Cheney: “Mistake” For GOP To “Moderate,” Glad That Detainees Were Waterboarded
Former Vice President Dick Cheney defended the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding on Thursday, saying that, contrary to arguments made by Barack Obama, the techniques were a necessary last-resort measure to get information from detainees.
“I don’t believe that’s true,” Cheney said, when asked to respond to Obama’s statement that interrogators may not have needed to resort to torture. “That assumes that we didn’t try other ways, and in fact we did. We resorted, for example, to waterboarding, which is the source of much of the controversy, with only three individuals. In those cases, it was only after we’d gone through all the other steps of the process. The way the whole program was set up was very careful, to use other methods and only to resort to the enhanced techniques in those special circumstances.”
The remarks, delivered during an interview with Scott Hennen, a conservative North Dakota radio host, glossed over the 266 instances in which the United States reportedly used waterboarding on two terrorist suspects — a figure that would suggest the technique was either not effective or not really used as a last-resort option.
Earlier, Cheney argued that the policies which he and other Bush administration officials pursued were, in fact, successful, and that his request to declassify information from the National Archives would prove as much.
via Cheney: “Mistake” For GOP To “Moderate,” Glad That Detainees Were Waterboarded.
Bush Administration Officials Behind Interrogation Memos May Avoid Professional Sanctions
Experts Say Authors Of Memos May Avoid Professional Sanctions
Efforts to impose professional sanctions on Bush administration lawyers who drafted memos supporting harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects face steep hurdles, experts on legal ethics said yesterday.
Law professors and legal practitioners who have handled such cases said the difficulty of gathering witnesses and evidence could present “nearly insurmountable challenges” for state investigators who may wish to pursue a case against the lawyers, John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee.
Government sources indicated this week that a forthcoming Justice Department investigative report would refer both men to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action as early as this summer. The report, which summarizes the findings of a nearly five-year review, cites sloppy legal analysis, misjudgments and possible political interference in the process, the sources said.
Yoo, now a law professor in California, and Bybee, now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, were in the department’s Office of Legal Counsel when they assessed the legality of simulated drowning and other harsh interrogation techniques for the CIA in a series of memos beginning in 2002. Ultimately, the lawyers gave a green light to waterboarding, sleep and food deprivation, and other tactics. The Obama administration has cast aside those techniques, saying they violate anti-torture laws and the Geneva Conventions.
Neither Yoo nor Bybee is likely to face criminal prosecution, a step that is nearly unprecedented for lawyers providing advice to clients. But they are expected to face inquiries from state legal authorities after the Justice Department report is made public. State bars have the power to disbar lawyers and suspend their licenses, among other steps.
via Bush Administration Officials Behind Interrogation Memos May Avoid Professional Sanctions.
US interrogators may have killed dozens, human rights researcher and rights group say
OPS: IS this part of the reason Bush is pushing for Obama to water down the report?
US interrogators may have killed dozens, human rights researcher
and rights group say
United States interrogators killed nearly four dozen detainees during or after their interrogations, according a report published by a human rights researcher based on a Human Rights First report and followup investigations.
In all, 98 detainees have died while in US hands. Thirty-four homicides have been identified, with at least eight detainees — and as many as 12 — having been tortured to death, according to a 2006 Human Rights First report that underwrites the researcher’s posting. The causes of 48 more deaths remain uncertain.
The researcher, John Sifton, worked for five years for Human Rights Watch. In a posting Tuesday, he documents myriad cases of detainees who died at the hands of their US interrogators. Some of the instances he cites are graphic.
Most of those taken captive were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. They include at least one Afghani soldier, Jamal Naseer, who was mistakenly arrested in 2004. “Those arrested with Naseer later said that during interrogations U.S. personnel punched and kicked them, hung them upside down, and hit them with sticks or cables,” Sifton writes. “Some said they were doused with cold water and forced to lie in the snow. Nasser collapsed about two weeks after the arrest, complaining of stomach pain, probably an internal hemorrhage.”
via Raw Story » US interrogators may have killed dozens, human rights researcher and rights group say.
Justice Department Ethics Report No Substitute For Criminal Investigations
Justice Department Ethics Report No Substitute For Criminal Investigations (5/6/2009)
Top-To-Bottom Investigation Of Torture Program Necessary, Says ACLU
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org
(202) 675-2312; media@dcaclu.org
NEW YORK – According to news reports, a draft report from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility concludes that the lawyers who wrote the “torture memos” legally sanctioning illegal interrogation methods committed serious lapses of judgment but should not be prosecuted. The Washington Post reports that former Bush administration officials launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to get the Justice Department to soften the ethics report.
The following can be attributed to Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union:
“Regardless of the findings from the Department of Justice ethics division, the ball is in Attorney General Holder’s court. The attorney general should not be swayed by political considerations or by an inquiry that was intentionally neutered and limited in scope. Attorney General Holder has said that he intends to follow the facts and the law wherever they lead. The logical next step is to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate those who authorized the torture program, those who legally sanctioned it and those who implemented it. It would be a dangerous precedent to conclude that lawyers who played a critical role in an illegal program are immune from criminal investigations. No one is above the law.”
The following can be attributed to Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office:
“Given the disturbing reports of pressure from Bush administration officials to water down this report, Congress must intervene and assert its oversight role. We cannot turn the page on the failed policies of the Bush administration when its lobbyists are attempting to rewrite history. This ethics review is only one piece of the puzzle. More than five years after the first disclosures of torture, it should concern all Americans that there is a 200-page draft government report on the role of three lawyers, but absolutely no Justice Department investigation of their clients – those top White House and CIA officials who asked for the opinions and reportedly made decisions on what torture tactics to use on which detainees. A top-to-bottom investigation is needed to examine not just those who authored these opinions but those who requested them and to determine whether these DOJ findings were watered down for political reasons. Congress can and must play an active role in that investigation.”
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice – by Marjorie Cohn
During the Vietnam War, Stanford students succeeded in banning secret military research from campus. Last weekend, 150 activist alumni and present Stanford students targeted Condoleezza Rice for authorizing torture and misleading Americans into the illegal Iraq War.
Veterans of the Stanford anti-Vietnam War movement had gathered for a 40th anniversary reunion during the weekend. The gathering featured panels on foreign policy, the economy, political and social movements, science and technology, media, energy and the environment, and strategies for aging activists.
On Sunday, surrounded by alumni and students, Lenny Siegel and I nailed a petition to the University President’s office door. The petition, circulated by Stanford Say No to War, reads:
“We the undersigned students, faculty, staff, alumni, and other concerned members of the Stanford community, believe that high officials of the U.S. Government, including our former Provost, current Political Science Professor, and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow, Condoleezza Rice, should be held accountable for any serious violations of the Law (included ratified treaties, statutes, and/or the U.S. Constitution) through investigation and, if the facts warrant, prosecution, by appropriate legal authorities.”
via OpEdNews » Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice.
Ashcroft Indirectly Makes An Argument For Torture Accountability
Ashcroft Indirectly Makes An Argument For Torture Accountability
ashcroftwebnew0505Today in a New York Times op-ed, former Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft noted that because the federal government has poured billions of dollars into the nation’s financial institutions to keep them afloat, a dilemma arises over how to deal with these companies’ illegal activities: Does the Justice Department issue an indictment when such an act, as Ashcroft noted, “is often a death sentence for a corporation” and thus would undermine the federal government’s efforts to save these companies and boost the economy?
Ashcroft makes the argument that, while criminal prosecutions may not be warranted, some accountability is necessary:
via Think Progress » Ashcroft Indirectly Makes An Argument For Torture Accountability.
Bush officials lobbying Obama Justice Department to ‘water down’ torture report.
Bush officials lobbying Obama Justice Department to ‘water down’ torture report.
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is expected to release a long-awaited report that will reveal the conduct of senior Bush administration lawyers who authorized torture. Newsweek reported recently that the report is “causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials.” Now, the Washington Post is reporting that Bush officials are lobbying the DOJ to weaken the report’s conclusions:
Former Bush administration officials are lobbying behind the scenes to push Justice Department leaders to water down an ethics report criticizing lawyers who blessed harsh detainee interrogation tactics, according to two sources familiar with the efforts.
via Think Progress » Bush officials lobbying Obama Justice Department to ‘water down’ torture report..
Support Our Troops: Prosecute Torture
Support Our Troops: Prosecute Torture
I have previously argued that failure to prosecute the officials who ordered torture will undermine the national security of the United States.
Today, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff expressed concern that Bush administration torture may now be used against U.S. troops for years to come – echoing the statements of John McCain.
Please think this through . . .
U.S. has a 45-year history of torture
U.S. has a 45-year history of torture
The difference between American involvement in South American atrocities in 1964 and ‘enhanced interrogation’ now is that some modern-day officials appear proud of themselves.
As President Obama grapples with accusations of torture by U.S. agents, I suggest he consult the former Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle.
I first contacted Daschle in 1975, when he was an aide to Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota, who was leading a somewhat lonely campaign against CIA abuses.
At the time, I was researching a book on the United States’ role in the spread of military dictatorships throughout Latin America. Daschle arranged for me to inspect the senator’s files, and I spent an evening reading accounts of U.S. complicity in torture. The stories came from Iran, Taiwan, Greece and, for the preceding 10 years, from Brazil and the rest of the continent’s Southern Cone.
Despite my past reporting from South Vietnam, I had been naive enough to be at first surprised and then appalled by the degree to which our country had helped to overthrow elected governments in Latin America.
via U.S. has a 45-year history of torture – Los Angeles Times.
Why the Faithful Approve of Torture
Why the Faithful Approve of Torture
Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of Christ” Holds Clues
The more often you go to church, the more you approve of torture. This is a troubling finding of a new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Shouldn’t it be the opposite? After all, who would Jesus torture? Since Jesus wouldn’t even let Peter use a sword and defend him from arrest, it would seem that those who follow Jesus would strenuously oppose the violence of torture. But, not so in America today.
Instead, more than half of people who attend worship at least once a week, or 54%, said that using torture on suspected terrorists was “often” or “sometimes” justified. White evangelical Protestants were the church-going group most likely to approve of torture. By contrast, those who are unaffiliated with a religious organization and didn’t attend worship were most opposed to torture — only 42% of those people approved of using torture.
One possible way to interpret this extraordinary Pew data is cultural. White evangelical Protestants tend to be culturally conservative and they make up a large percentage of the so-called Republican “base”. Does the approval of torture by this group demonstrate their continuing support for the previous administration? That may be.
via On Faith Panelists Blog: Why the Faithful Approve of Torture – On Faith at washingtonpost.com.
4th-Grader Questions Rice on Waterboarding
OPS: A 4th Grader trips her up. ….. good gawd
4th-Grader Questions Rice on Waterboarding
Ex-Secretary of State Stresses Legality
Days after telling students at Stanford University that waterboarding was legal “by definition if it was authorized by the president,” former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was pressed again on the subject yesterday by a fourth-grader at a Washington school.
Rice, in her first appearance in Washington since leaving government, was at the Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation’s Capital before giving an evening lecture at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue. She held forth amiably before a few dozen students about her love of Israel, travel abroad and the importance of learning languages, then opened the floor to their questions.
The questions had been developed beforehand by students with their teachers and had not been screened by Rice. At first, they were innocuous: What was it like growing up in segregated Birmingham, Ala.? What skill did she want to be best known for?
via 4th-Grader Questions Rice on Waterboarding – washingtonpost.com.
O’Donnell: ‘Senior Democrats’ might investigate ‘false statements’ to Congress about torture.
O’Donnell: ‘Senior Democrats’ might investigate ‘false statements’ to Congress about torture.
On The Chris Matthews Show today, NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Kelly O’Donnell reported that congressional Democrats were considering “a different way to go at accountability of the so-called torture memos.” “Senior Democrats have told me that they might look at the possibility of were there false statements made to Congress,” said O’Donnell:
O’DONNELL: Senior Democrats have told me that they might look at the possibility of were there false statements made to Congress, was there any perjury, when some of the people involved in policy and legal parts of all of that appeared before Congress a few years ago. Now things have been declassified, compare them and see, is there anything there. A different way to go at accountability of the so-called torture memos.
Watch it:
Bybee refuses to respond to Leahy’s testimony invitation.
Bybee refuses to respond to Leahy’s testimony invitation.
impeachbybee.jpgOn Wednesday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) sent a letter to Judge Jay Bybee inviting him to testify about his “views” about torture and his “role” in drafting the torture memos. In the letter, Leahy wrote, “I look forward to your cooperation and your testimony.” But the Los Angeles Times reports today that Bybee has “declined to respond” to Leahy’s letter. Bybee’s law clerks initially gave contradictory messages about how the judge would respond, but law clerk Keith Woffinden tried to clean up the confusion, telling the paper, “my impression is that there won’t be any further statements” beyond Bybee’s comments to the New York Times.
via Think Progress » Bybee refuses to respond to Leahy’s testimony invitation..
Robert Byrd Demands Torture Investigation
Robert Byrd Demands Torture Investigation
Sen. Robert Byrd, the longest-serving Senator in history, today demanded an investigation of torture by the Bush Administration:
The recently leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as well as the four released memorandums from the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), confirm our worst fears. These documents point to brutal, inhumane acts which were repeatedly carried out by U.S. military personnel, and which were authorized and condoned at the highest levels of the Bush Administration. These acts appear to directly violate both the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions. Spain and the United Kingdom have already initiated investigations of Bush Administration officials who approved these acts. The United States needs to investigate as well. To continue to ignore the mounting evidence of clear wrongdoing is a national humiliation.
Byrd is the President pro tempore of the Senate, which puts him third in the line of Presidential succession behind Vice President Biden and Speaker Pelosi. He was a powerful moral voice during the Bush years; he opposed the Iraq War in 2002 and tried to bring our troops home in September 2005. That December, he denounced torture and Bush’s other assaults on the Constitution:
via Robert Byrd Demands Torture Investigation | Democrats.com.
John Dean: Rice may have admitted to conspiracy
Rice may have admitted to conspiracy, former Nixon counsel says
In little-noticed comments Thursday, the former White House counsel for President Richard Nixon John Dean said Thursday that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may have unwittingly admitted to a criminal conspiracy when questioned about torture by a group of student videographers at Stanford.
Rice told students at Stanford that she didn’t authorize torture, she merely forwarded the authorization for it. Dean, who became a poster child for whistleblowing after aiding the prosecution of the Watergate affair, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann that Rice may have admitted to a criminal conspiracy.
In a video that surfaced Thursday, Rice said, “The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligation, legal obligations under the convention against torture… I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.” (Video of Rice’s comments appears at the bottom of this article.)
Her comments raised eyebrows from online observers, who compared Rice’s answer to that of Richard Nixon’s infamous quip: “When the President does it, that means that it’s not illegal.”
via Raw Story » Rice may have admitted to conspiracy, former Nixon counsel says.
Fleischer: ‘I’ll be proud to testify if I get a subpoena.’
OPS: Are ya feelin lucky, punk? Well, are ya?
Fleischer: ‘I’ll be proud to testify if I get a subpoena.’
Today during a panel discussion for the IFC Media Project, former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer argued forcefully against launching an in-depth investigation of the Bush administration’s torture program. However, he said that if it does happen, he’s ready for them to bring it on:
He argued that neither Congress nor anyone else is up to the task, and that any investigation would “lead to acrimony and blame-gaming” and “devolve into the worst type of partisanship.” While noting that “no one likes to get a subpoena,” Fleischer said, “I’ll be proud to testify if I get a subpoena. I’m proud of what we did to protect this country.” Those wanting to see Fleischer—or at least some of his former colleagues—on the witness stand include his fellow panelists Noonan, who called for a 9/11 Commission-style investigation, and Tina Brown, who quoted Senator Patrick Leahy’s contention that “before you can turn a page, you want to read it.” When moderator (and Media Project host) Gideon Yago brought up the idea of a special prosecutor, Fleischer sternly pointed out that “that assumes a crime has been committed.”
via Think Progress » Fleischer: ‘I’ll be proud to testify if I get a subpoena.’.
The CIA’s $1,000 a Day Specialists on Waterboarding, Interrogations
OPS: These guys need to be prosecuted also
As the secrets about the CIA’s interrogation techniques continue to come out, there’s new information about the frequency and severity of their use, contradicting an 2007 ABC News report, and a new focus on two private contractors who were apparently directing the brutal sessions that President Obama calls torture.
According to current and former government officials, the CIA’s secret waterboarding program was designed and assured to be safe by two well-paid psychologists now working out of an unmarked office building in Spokane, Washington.
via The CIA’s $1,000 a Day Specialists on Waterboarding, Interrogations – ABC News.
