Category: Torture

And one of those who inflicted it now says so in public. He also says it was necessary. But what we know of what the mentally challenged Zubaydah told us suggests it was largely garbage. Bart Gellman summarizes Ron Suskind’s reporting on the matter:

Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each…target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

So if the guy who tortured Zubaydah says it was torture, will the president now admit it? And will the attorney-general initiate the prosecution of all those involved in an illegal war-crime? It’s called the rule of law, Mr Mukasey. And you are in office to enforce it.

TPM has a pretty devastating round-up of weekend reax to the CIA’s destruction of torture tapes. Only Bill Kristol seems to favor the destruction. Can you imagine what he’d be saying if a Democratic president had presided over it?

Mark Kleiman explains:

1. Written a letter to the President, the Attorney General, and the DCI saying "On Date X we received a briefing about certain intelligence activities, still ongoing and carried out as a matter of policy, in clear contravention of both the criminal laws of the United States and of treaty obligations. We insist that those activities stop forthwith, and that those who have engaged in them be considered for prosecution."

2. On the Senate side, demanded an Executive Session (no visitors, no staff) and named the date of the briefing, the briefers, and the word "torture." Even if that leaked, without details it couldn’t constitute a security violation.

3. Filed a resolution naming the date of the briefing and ordering the members of the Gang of Eight to reveal what they were told to the two Houses. That resolution could have been accompanied by a statement saying "We have learned about serious violations of law being carried out as matters of policy. We think the Congress ought to have the option of either learning what we know or remaining in ignorance. In the meantime, we have demanded that the illegal activities stop forthwith."

That’s not so hard, is it? Ya wimps.

Huckabee, Paul and McCain are now on the right side of this profound divide. Romney and Giuliani on the other. I don’t have a great deal of hope that this will be a dispositive issue (in the good sense), but I do know and hope that there are plenty of old-style Republicans out there who are horrified by torture, who uphold America’s traditional intolerance of it, and who want to end it. If they still feel at home in the GOP, their choice for president is now clearer.

(By the way, can the Washington Post get its act together and realize that Ron Paul is running for president and has a record on this issue going back just as far as McCain? Jeez: the blindness of the Washington press with respect to Paul is still staggering.)

Hot Air does something really quite spectacular, even by far-right blog standards – they’re blaming John McCain for the CIA’s destruction of evidence of war-crimes. They don’t seem want to understand that torture has always been illegal in the US, and that waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions and hypothermia have always been understood as methods of torture. This war hasn’t been "politicized" by McCain’s attempts to stamp out torture. It has been betrayed by an indecent president, vice-president and then-defense secretary. Joe Gandelman sees shades of Watergate. John Cole is speechless in the face of "what my country has turned into." Larry Johnson predicts:

Jose Rodriguez will not be the only one walking the public plank on this issue. Other intelligence officers likely to be asked tough questions include Cofer Black (now a senior official with Blackwater) and Ambassador Henry "Hank" Crumpton, who was Cofer’s deputy and subsequently served as the Coordinator for Counter Terrorism at State Department. George Tenet and John McLaughlin will also have some ‘splaining to do.

So will the president.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is unloading what he found after being granted access to various Bush Office Of Legal Counsel opinions. Every time you think you’re hallucinating about the powers this president has accrued to himself, you come across a reality more surreal:

To give you an example of what I read, I have gotten three legal propositions from these OLC opinions declassified. Here they are, as accurately as my note taking could reproduce them from the classified documents. Listen for yourself. I will read all three, and then discuss each one.

1. An executive order cannot limit a President. There is no constitutional requirement for a President to issue a new executive order whenever he wishes to depart from the terms of a previous executive order. Rather than violate an executive order, the President has instead modified or waived it.

2. The President, exercising his constitutional authority under Article II, can determine whether an action is a lawful exercise of the President’s authority under Article II.

3. The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations.

Richard Milhous Bush. And the evidence suggests Mukasey may have a bruising non-honeymoon as AG. I’m also hearing rumors that the obstruction of justice in the CIA tape=destruction case may be even more clear-cut than we previously thought.

Her office emails:

Several blogs are reacting to incorrect information about Jane Harman’s position on the videotapes destroyed by the CIA. The original AP story, which reported that Harman was informed of the tapes’ destruction in 2003, was wrong and has been corrected.  Harman was never informed of the tapes’ destruction (reported to have occurred in 2005) and made clear to the CIA that any proposed destruction would be a bad idea.  Her 2003 letter to the CIA General Counsel which she has urged be declassified has never been responded to.

Here’s the corrected AP story.

Scott Horton puts it simply:

Let’s first focus on this question: Why is this evidence being destroyed? The answer is painfully acknowledged. The CIA leadership and other senior administration officials are fully cognizant of the fact that the use of a number of specific practices which these tapes almost certainly document, to-wit: waterboarding, long-time standing, hypothermia, psychotropic drugs and sleep deprivation in excess of two days, are serious crimes under American law and the law of almost all nations. Consequently, those who have used them and those who have authorized their use will almost certainly ultimately face criminal prosecution at some point in the future.

The Administration’s attempts to immunize the perpetrators have failed. Any purported grant of a pardon by President Bush will be legally ineffective, because Bush himself is a collaborator in the scheme. And there is no statute of limitations. Therefore the prospect of prosecution is hardly far-fetched. It is a virtual certainty. So the evidence is being destroyed precisely because it would be used as evidence of criminal acts in a prosecution of administration figures and those acting under their direction. Therefore, this is a conscious, calculated obstruction of justice.

This is Mukasey’s moment. He needs to find who authorized this and prosecute them. And if the president authorized it, obstruction of justice in the case of war crimes is obviously an impeachable offense.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet another war criminal at the heart of the Bush administration: John Rizzo.

What the hell was Jane Harman doing? From the AP:

Rep. Jane Harman of California, then the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and one of only four members of Congress informed of the tapes’ existence, said she objected to the destruction when informed of it in 2003.

"I told the CIA that destroying videotapes of interrogations was a bad idea and urged them in writing not to do it," Harman said. While key lawmakers were briefed on the CIA’s intention to destroy the tapes, they were not notified two years later when the spy agency went through with the plan. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said the committee only learned of the tapes’ destruction in November 2006.

A leading Democrat is told that the CIA is destroying evidence of its own war crimes and says and does nothing? They really are a pathetic bunch. Greenwald feels the same way.