Bush-Era Interrogation Memos Released
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| Fri, 04-17-2009 - 12:18pm |
Administration Releases Bush-Era Interrogation Memos
Complete article see link......
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/bulletin/bulletin_090417.htm
The Justice Department's release of several memos from the Bush Administration authorizing the CIA to use harsh interrogation methods is receiving intense media coverage. The Washington Post says the memos "lay out in clinical, painstaking detail a series of practices intended to get prisoners to share intelligence," while the AP says they "graphically" detail such "grim tactics as slamming detainees against walls, waterboarding them and keeping them naked and cold for long periods." ABC World News said "they read like a step by step how to manual, how to extract information from high value terror suspects" while staying just within what the Bush Administration "said the law might allow." McClatchy says they offer "the most unvarnished and explicit look yet at once-top secret efforts to psychologically break high-level terrorism suspects," while the Los Angeles Times notes that they "not only catalog the methods that the CIA was authorized to use...but spell out in often disconcerting detail how such methods were to be administered."
NBC Nightly News noted that the memos provide "the fullest description yet of the techniques used by the CIA on roughly 30 detainees," including "slapping, sleep deprivation, stress positions, nudity, something called 'walling' -- slamming detainees against a false wall, provided they wear a collar to minimize whiplash." By releasing the memos, the AP says, President Obama said he wanted to move beyond "a dark and painful chapter in our history." But "human rights advocates argued that Obama should not have assured the CIA" that officers would not be prosecuted. However, on its front page, the Washington Post reports that in "a carefully worded statement," the Obama Administration "left open the possibility that operatives and higher-level administration officials could face jeopardy if they ventured beyond the boundaries drawn by the Bush lawyers."


President Obama strikes a wise balance in coming to terms with the torture of terrorism suspects.
See link for complete article.....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/16/AR2009041603911.html?nav=hcmodule
THE OBAMA administration acted courageously and wisely yesterday with its dual actions on interrogation policy. The pair of decisions -- one essentially forgiving government agents who may have committed heinous acts they were told were legal, the other signaling that such acts must never again be condoned by the United States -- struck exactly the right balance.
The administration announced that it would not seek to press criminal charges against CIA operatives who participated in enhanced interrogations of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration. "It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement.
I heard some of the opposition criticizing this move because it "embarrassed the CIA".
What the heck are you referring to?!?!
Torture technique outlawed by Obama was used extensively on 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and alleged terror commander Abu Zubaydah
>"The documents showed waterboarding was used 183 times on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who admitted planning the 9/11 attacks, the New York Times reported today.
The US Justice Department memos released last Thursday showed that waterboarding, which the US now admits is torture, was used 83 times on the alleged al-Qaida senior commander Abu Zubaydah, the paper said. A former CIA officer claimed in 2007 that Zubaydah was subjected to the simulated drowning technique for only 35 seconds.
The numbers were removed from most of the memos over the weekend. But bloggers, including Marcy Wheeler from empytwheel, discovered that the figure had not been blanked out from one of the memos."<
>"A footnote to another 2005 justice department memo released last week said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than the CIA rules permitted."<
Complete article at link below......
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/20/waterboarding-alqaida-khalid-sheikh-mohammed
...which the US now admits is torture...
I really take exception with this...WE KNEW all along that it was torture, it was the BUSH Admin who refused to acknowledge it!
>"A footnote to another 2005 justice department memo released last week said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than the CIA rules permitted."<
As far as this goes, if they can determine who was responsible for this, then they should be punished accordingly.
Where 'Those Methods' Lead
By Eugene Robinson
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/23/AR2009042303717.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
The many roads of inquiry into the Bush administration's abusive "interrogation techniques" all lead to one stubborn, inconvenient fact: Torture is not just immoral but also illegal. This means that once we learn the whole truth, the law will oblige us to act on it.
Understandably, the Obama administration wants to avoid getting bogged down in a long, wrenching legal drama that almost certainly would be partisan and divisive. But I'm not sure it's possible to skirt the criminal implications of what we already know, let alone what we might find out in a full-scale "truth commission" investigation with access to all relevant witnesses and documents.
On the moral question, the administration has been straightforward and righteous. One of President Obama's first acts was to declare that the United States will no longer practice waterboarding or other abusive interrogation methods, saying that such depredations are inimical to our nation's values and traditions. Attorney General Eric Holder stated at his confirmation hearings that "waterboarding is torture." This refreshing and admirable clarity stands in stark contrast to the fog of legalistic sophistry in which the Bush administration cloaked its secret prisons.
On the legal question, though, the Obama team has been far less definitive. This is what Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, told his staff about the interrogation abuses in a memo last week: "I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past, but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given."
To state the obvious, this makes no sense at all. If Blair would not have sanctioned "those methods" -- some of which clearly meet the legal definition of torture, in my view -- then why would he give a pass to those who ordered the abuses and those who carried them out?
At least Blair, charged with leading the agents who performed the abuses, has a reason for going all fuzzy on the matter of accountability. And we can thank him for definitively refuting the most commonly cited pro-torture argument: that waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions and other abuses were necessary to obtain vital information that kept Americans safe from another al-Qaeda attack.
"High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used," Blair wrote in the memo. But in a separate statement, he added that "there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means."
Yes, people break under torture and tell what they know, along with what they don't know and what they think their torturers want to hear. But there is no way to be certain that the valuable information wouldn't have been extracted through traditional -- and legal -- methods of interrogation.
Even if experts have differing views about torture's effectiveness, there is one point on which they cannot disagree: It violates U.S. and international law.
What abuses legally qualify as torture? That probably depends on which of several possibly applicable legal standards is applied. At a bare minimum, though, it seems clear to me that waterboarding will almost certainly be deemed illegal if put under judicial scrutiny. The practice has been considered torture at least since the Spanish Inquisition -- except, apparently, in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush.
I don't know what more we'll find out if a blue-ribbon investigative panel of some kind is formed. But what we already know is enough to ensure that sooner or later, the abusive interrogation methods authorized by Bush, Dick Cheney and other officials are going to be measured against the law. Our system, left to its own devices, is not designed to let illegal acts be revealed and then ignored.
From the viewpoint of the Obama administration, the alternatives may be unattractive or even unacceptable. No one wants to see low-ranking CIA interrogators go down for doing what their superiors told them was legal, especially if the superiors are not held to account. But pursuing criminal charges against the highest-ranking officials of the previous administration would be unprecedented, and it is unclear where such a process might lead.
It will be hard to stop this train, though. The rule of law is one of this nation's founding principles. It's not optional. Our laws against torture demand to be obeyed -- and demand to be enforced.