ACLU Calls for Probe of Admin Torture Talks
Two former senior intelligence officials have come forward to confirm reports top Bush administration officials personally discussed and approved how top al-Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA. This week, ABC News revealed a Principals Committee on the National Security Council agreed on controversial interrogation techniques including physical assault, sleep deprivation and waterboarding. The officials included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft. In an interview with the Associated Press, a former senior US intelligence official said the group met in the White House Situation Room and deliberately insulated President Bush from their discussions. The meetings were said to include live demonstrations from CIA officials of the interrogation methods in practice, including waterboarding. The American Civil Liberties Union is calling for a congressional investigation. ACLU legislative director Caroline Fredrickson said, "With each new revelation, it is beginning to look like the torture operation was managed and directed out of the White House. This is what we suspected all along."In the old blog, there are many posts on torture. Generally I assume that my opposition is to "torture and killing being done in my name by the leadership of my own country." However, there is precious little confirmation that infamous documents, like the Bybee memo of August 1, 2002, that clearly indicate top-level involvement in covering up torture, were actually discussed by senior officials. Now we have that.
See also, this extraordinary April 3 interview on Democracy Now! with British journalist, Philippe Sands. Excellent reporting by Seymour Hersh (see the book "Chain of Command") plowed this ground. Sands recent article in Vanity Fair on the Green Light also describes the real workings of the Torture Administration:
PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, I think that the administration’s narrative has always been they really didn’t authorize these things; what happened was it started on the ground at Guantanamo, they faced a situation with individuals who they thought presented a threat to US security, and from the ground, from the people at Guantanamo, new security, new interrogation measures were requested. And so, it’s a bottom-up theory that the administration has always pushed.What really struck me in the Sands interview is his statement about how foolish it has been following the Supreme Court Hamden vs. Rumsfeld decision for the political branches of the U.S. government to immunize themselves on torture through the onerous Military Commissions Act of 2006:
What of course emerged, as many I think suspected, is that that’s not an accurate narrative. It in fact came from the top down, and there was a small group of lawyers coalescing around the President, around the Vice President, around the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld, who basically drove the whole thing through.
Justice Anthony Kennedy put in a separate opinion. He was with the majority. And he opened the door to war crimes possibilities. He said this means that war crimes violations may well be investigated in relation to situations in which the Geneva Convention was not followed. The administration recognized the threat that it faced, and within three months it had adopted legislation in the Military Commissions Act which created an immunity for any person who was involved in the interrogation of al-Qahtani, as well as many other people. That immunity applies within the United States.No one will cheer louder than I if Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Gonzales, and others one day are forced to face justice for their crimes against humanity.
But, as I write in the article in Vanity Fair, it doesn’t go beyond the United States. And I describe in the Vanity Fair piece, in much more detail than in the book, the meetings I’ve had with a European judge and a European prosecutor, who basically said the fact that the US has created a domestic immunity significantly increases the prospects of international investigational prosecution, if any of these people set foot out of the country. And as the prosecutor said to me, that was a very stupid thing to do, to create an immunity.