Stone Cupid Real

On Apr. 11, Bush told ABC that he was personally aware of the panel's discussions. "Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush said. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

Torture and the Law
    By Spencer Ackerman
    The Washington Independent

    Friday 18 April 2008

Experts weigh in on top officials talking torture with Bush's approval.

    With nine months remaining in President George W. Bush's term, virtually no legal analyst expects that anyone in his administration will face indictment and prosecution in connection with the torture of terrorism detainees. However, a new admission from Bush last week has some legal analysts contending that the case for such prosecution has gotten significantly stronger.

    ABC News reported on Apr. 9 that then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice chaired an informal panel of top administration officials that approved specific brutal interrogation tactics for use on three suspected Al Qaeda detainees. The panel consisted of Vice President Dick Cheney, and former administration officials - Donald H. Rumsfeld, then defense secretary, Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state, George Tenet, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and John Ashcroft, then attorney general. This group debated for use on detainees - and eventually approved - methods of abuse like being "slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding," ABC reported.

    On Apr. 11, Bush told ABC that he was personally aware of the panel's discussions. "Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush said. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

    This disclosure presents a nested series of legal implications. "I predict that there will be calls for top administration officials to be prosecuted in an international court for war crimes," said Erwin Chemerinsky, a civil liberties expert who teaches at Duke University Law School. "This meeting supports the involvement of top officials - including the president - in approving torture."

    "If you, as an individual, order such conduct, you're culpable under the aiding-and-abetting provision of federal law," said Aziz Huq, director of the Liberty and National Security Project at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. "There is at least a colorable theory, a credible case, for federal criminal liability here."

    That theory, however, depends on whether the administration's 2002 meetings - and Bush's approval - rose to the level of an operational order. The treatment of the three detainees, which Huq says was a "violation of the Federal Torture Statute," included the employment of several of the techniques reportedly considered by Rice's panel, including waterboarding. Currently, the Justice Department has an investigation open into Jose Rodriguez, a former CIA official who destroyed videotapes of those interrogations.

    "In my view this is all patently illegal on many different grounds - particularly as a violation of Common Article 3" of the Geneva conventions, said Martin S. Lederman, a former lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel who now teaches law at Georgetown University. "But as a practical matter, there's little likelihood of any legal exposure - and virtually none of domestic federal prosecution, because the president and DOJ concluded it was legal."

    The chain of events leading from Rice's panel to the CIA's use of the techniques that the panel apparently discussed is not publicly known, and no official inquiry into it exists. To make a case against Bush himself - regardless of the likelihood that he will never face charges - knowing that is essential.

    "He has his fingerprints on torture," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, "but did he grip the whole thing? The real question is, what level of decision-making was the president involved in?"

    Not every legal scholar is impressed by Bush's disclosure. Douglas Kmiec, a conservative law professor at Pepperdine University, contends that the statutes in question are too vague, and the facts of the matter too obscure, to congeal into an actual case against the president. "The whole difficulty in this area is the level of generality that exists in the international agreements that the U.S. has participated in and the manner in which those were ratified by the United States - obviously, particularly with the Convention Against Torture," Kmiec said. "But where the slippage is, in terms of legal analysis, comes with what those words mean in terms of domestic law. If I've understood matters correctly, we've tried to understand [the convention] in terms of our own Bill of Rights and the 'shock-the-conscience' standard - which is a standard that's far from self-evident."

    As a matter of providing factual clarity, Fredrickson said a coalition of civil-liberties organizations, led by the ACLU, is drafting a letter to the congressional leadership urging the creation of a bicameral commission into both the facts of the torture and the legal implications. An implication of Rice's meetings is that the Bush administration appears to have effectively decided it would not bring charges against itself for criminal behavior.

    "No one in the executive branch is free of the taint of involvement with the 2002 interrogations," said Huq, of the Brennan Center. "The whole idea of the executive branch immunizing itself becomes much more worrying than in other cases. It's really the right hand absolving the left hand of what's been done."

    Fredrickson wants the commission modeled after the Church and Pike inquiries of the 1970s that revealed massive and systemic illegality within the intelligence services. "It's a great model because it was really the mechanism for bringing lot of illegality - not just by the Nixon administration but prior administrations - to light," she said. "That might be more appropriate, to use a wider lens, because panorama of illegality is quite broad."

Read more at t r u t o u t

By Will Bunch
thanks to The Philadelphia Inquirer
Monday 14 April 2008

Tonight I had an opportunity to ask Barack Obama a question that is on the minds of many Americans, yet rarely rises to the surface in the great ruckus of the 2008 presidential race - and that is whether an Obama administration would seek to prosecute officials of a former Bush administration on the revelations that they greenlighted torture, or for other potential crimes that took place in the White House.

Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to "immediately review the information that's already there" and determine if an inquiry is warranted - but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as "a partisan witch hunt." However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because "nobody is above the law."

The question was inspired by a recent report by ABC News, confirmed by the Associated Press, that high-level officials including Vice President Dick Cheney and former Cabinet secretaries Colin Powell, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld, among others, met in the White House and discussed the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques on terrorism suspects.

I mentioned the report in my question, and said "I know you've talked about reconciliation and moving on, but there's also the issue of justice, and a lot of people - certainly around the world and certainly within this country - feel that crimes were possibly committed" regarding torture, rendition, and illegal wiretapping. I wanted to know how whether his Justice Department "would aggressively go after and investigate whether crimes have been committed."

Here's his answer, in its entirety:

"What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that's already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can't prejudge that because we don't have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You're also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we've got too many problems we've got to solve.
So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment - I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General - having pursued, having looked at what's out there right now - are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it's important- one of the things we've got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing between really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I've said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law - and I think that's roughly how I would look at it."
The bottom line is that: Obama sent a clear signal that - unlike impeachment, which he's ruled out and which now seems a practical impossibility - he is at the least open to the possibility of investigating potential high crimes in the Bush White House. To many, the information that waterboarding - which the United States has considered torture and a violation of law in the past - was openly planned out in the seat of American government is evidence enough to at least start asking some tough questions in January 2009.

thanks to t r u t h o u t

By Jan Crawford Greenberg, Howard L. Rosenberg and Ariane de Vogue
ABC News

Friday 11 April 2008

President says he knew his senior advisors approved tough interrogation methods.
President Bush says he knew his top national security advisors discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.

"Well, we started to connect the dots, in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC New s White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And, yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

As first reported by ABC News on Wednesday, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed - down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects - whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques - using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time - on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Contacted by ABC News, spokesmen for Tenet and Rumsfeld declined to comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in Principals Meetings. The White House also declined comment on behalf of Rice and Cheney. Ashcroft could not be reached.

Powell said through an assistant there were "hundreds of [Principals] meetings" on a wide variety of topics and that he was "not at liberty to discuss private meetings."

In his interview with ABC News, Bush said the ABC report about the Principals' involvement was not so "startling." The President had earlier confirmed the existence of the interrogation program run by the CIA in a speech in 2006. But before Wednesday's report, the extraordinary level of involvement by the most senior advisers in repeatedly approving specific interrogation plans - down to the number of times the CIA could use a certain tactic on a specific al Qaeda prisoner - had never been disclosed.

Critics at home and abroad have harshly criticized the interrogation program, which pushed the limits of international law and, they say, condoned torture. Bush and his top aides have consistently defended the program. They say it is legal and did not constitute torture.

In interview with ABC's Charles Gibson last year, Tenet said: "It was authorized. It was legal, according to the Attorney General of the United States."

Read the rest here.

NEVER VOTE FOR THE OTHER TWO, FEINSTEIN AND SCHUMER, AGAIN. THEY JUST NOMINATED MICHAEL MUKASEY AS TORTURER GENERAL.

 

Grrrrrrr. Good Germans.

 

Read the comments after the article in the LA Times... 

 

    Thursday 04 October 2007

    Washington - When the Justice Department publicly declared torture "abhorrent" in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

    But soon after Alberto Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

    The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

    Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on "combined effects" over the objections of James Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion's overreaching legal reasoning, Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be "ashamed" when the world eventually learned of it.

    Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the CIA interrogation methods violated that standard.

    The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President George W. Bush's second term and Gonzales's tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

    Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

    A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Fratto added, "We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law" and international agreements.

    More than two dozen current and former officials involved in counterterrorism were interviewed over the past three months about the opinions and the deliberations on interrogation policy. Most officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the documents and the CIA detention operations they govern.

    When he stepped down as attorney general in September after widespread criticism of the firing of federal prosecutors and withering attacks on his credibility, Gonzales talked proudly in a farewell speech of how his department was "a place of inspiration" that had balanced the necessary flexibility to conduct the war on terrorism with the need to uphold the law.

    Associates at the Justice Department said Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David Addington, Cheney's counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department's independence.

    The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and detention policies at congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office's tradition of avoiding political advocacy.

    Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government's most authoritative interpreter of the law. "In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out," he said in an interview. "The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn't like the advice being given."

    The debate over how terrorism suspects should be held and questioned began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the Bush administration adopted secret detention and coercive interrogation, both practices the United States had previously denounced when used by other countries. It adopted the new measures without public debate or congressional vote, choosing to rely instead on the confidential legal advice of a handful of appointees.

    The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Gonzales and Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.

    After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, Bush for the first time acknowledged the CIA's secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guant‡namo Bay, Cuba. The CIA halted its use of waterboarding, or pouring water over a bound prisoner's cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

    But in July, after a monthlong debate inside the administration, Bush signed a new executive order authorizing the use of what the administration calls "enhanced" interrogation techniques - the details remain secret - and officials say the CIA again is holding prisoners in "black sites" overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.

Read More...