The CIA Directors Protecting Themselves
The AP reports that along with John Deutsch and Michael Hayden, George Tenet and Porter Goss have criticized Obama’s release of the torture memos.
Of course Tenet and Goss would criticize Obama’s decision. Both of them are personally implicated by revelations in the memos.
As I noted (as did William Ockham–I stole his transcription), the May 30, 2005 memo makes it clear that people at CIA Headquarters ordered Abu Zubaydah to be waterboarded additional time(s)–for the 83rd time, perhaps?–even after interrogators working with him directly believed he was complying with their demands.
This is not to say that the interrogation program has worked perfectly. According to the IG Report, the CIA, at least initially, could not always distinguish detainees who had information but were successfully resisting interrogation from those who did not actually have the information. See IG report at 83-85. On at least one occasion, this may have resulted in what might be deemed in retrospect to have been the unnecessary use of enhanced techniques. On that occasion, although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements with CIA Headquarters still believed he was withholding information. [Redaction of more than one full line] See id, at 84. At the direction of CIA Headquarters interrogators, therefore used the waterboard one more time on Zubaydah. [Redaction of ~3/4 of a line] See id, at 84-85.
We can’t pin this on Tenet directly, though we do know Bush was pressuring Tenet at the time to deliver some kind of intelligence that would substantiate Bush’s public assertions that Abu Zubaydah was important within the Al Qaeda ranks.
"I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,"
And in any case, we know that the one time when even the CIA agrees Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded "needlessly," it was done on the order of CIA headquarters under Tenet’s leadership.
Also as I noted, the May 10, 2005 "Techniques" memo reveals that Abu Zubaydah’s interrogator far exceeding OLC guidlines on how to administer waterboarding.
The IG Report noted that in some cases the waterboard was used with far greater frequency than initially indicated, see IG Report at 5, 44, 46, 103-04, and also that it was used in a different manner. See id. at 37 ("[T]he waterboard technique … was different from the technique described in the DoJ opinion and used in the SERE training. The difference was the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed. At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject’s airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency Interrogator … applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency’s use of the technique is different from that used in SERE training because it is "for real–and is more poignant and convincing.") see also id. at 14 n14.[my emphasis]
Not only does this implicate Tenet–who was DCI at the time–for further mismanagement, but it implicates his successor Porter Goss.
Goss was in charge when the CIA–having been warned not to destroy the torture tapes–did so anyway. And this OLC memo provides proof that CIA had more to worry about than just that the identities of those depicted administering torture on the tapes would be revealed. We know that the tapes were clear evidence that the interrogators were breaking the law–exceeding even the expansive guidelines laid out in the Bybee Memo on how waterboarding should be used. This memo, in other words, proves what we already suspected–that the torture tape destruction served to obstruct justice.
And that destruction happened on Portor Goss’ watch, even after he had been warned not to let the tapes be destroyed.
So its no wonder that Tenet and Goss would object to the release of these memos.
What is surprising, though, is that journalists wouldn’t begin to explore why Tenet and Goss feel so strongly about it.
Re last nights questions about possible involvement of children in the enhanced interrogations:
How much would you pay to be certain that none of the 92 destroyed tapes showed children being waterboarded?
It would irresponsible not to ask.
I saw somewhere that Zubaydah and/or KSM had been waterboarded up to 150 times. Is there any support for that?
AZ: 83 times
KSM: 183 times
Both per the memos. Page 37 of the May 30 memo:
So they were running production numbers.
Did any CIA operatives get bonuses based on exceeding their goals?
Six times a day, seven days a week, for a month.
A procedure for which the U.S. convicted (and executed?) a Japanese military official after WWII.
But no prosecution of those carrying it out, eh?
All the more reason to focus with increasing intensity on the guys applying the pressure from the top.
Yup. That’s pretty much the math. Hey KSM! Want your gruel?!?! FIrst you gotta suck on some water for a while.
See, the sheer number alone is chilling and puts the lie to the manner Bushco portrayed the subject.
Gives a whole new and more ominous meaning to Tenet’s “slam dunk” statement, doesn’t it?
Wanted to post this small round-up for those interested before reading what looks to be yet one more excellent EW article:
Report from France
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/….._0418.html
http://tinyurl.com/dafgl2
A madman’s view of torture
http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh//
Did you know he burst into Timothy O’Leary’s bedroom once, brandishing big guns? Among other strange things he’s done.
Medical torturers
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..88557.html
http://tinyurl.com/d79yhu
Report from Germany
http://watchingamerica.com/New…..mmunition/
http://tinyurl.com/dmyar4
from the UK
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm…..bush-memos
http://tinyurl.com/cm7t7w
“What is surprising, though, is that journalists wouldn’t begin to explore why Tenet and Goss feel so strongly about it.”
Especially when journalists were already played by CIA sources. From a September 2007 by dependable mouthpiece Brian Ross at ABC:
“A senior CIA official said KSM later admitted it was only because of the waterboarding that he talked.
Ultimately, KSM took responsibility for the 9/ll attacks and virtually all other al Qaeda terror strikes, including the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
“KSM lasted the longest under waterboarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again,” said a former CIA official familiar with KSM’s case.”
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thebl…..ater-.html
So, was it 90 seconds for KSM, or 183 separate times?
What a great quote, Ishmael (and what great files you have).
I guess for me (and the theme on this thread), the interesting question was whether Tenet or Goss was the “former CIA official familiar with KSMs case” that Ross gave anonymous cover as a source.
While some sources have said that Obama has not made any preemptive commitment against prosecution of CIA officers who were involved in the actual torture in reliance on the Torture Memos, it concerns me greatly that he is essentially interfering with prosecutorial discretion by an appeal to expediency, “moving on”, “mistakes were made”, and the idea that dubious legal advice from Very Serious People somehow made it all understandable. The same arguments can be made by some of the Very Serious People who should be worried about US prosecutions, not Spanish ones. I would actually prefer that Obama issue a pardon to all the actual torturers than portray it as “moving on” and the Executive deciding to shield Executive crimes by declining to prosecute – at least then, the political and bureaucratic cover he wants could be achieved, while at the same time making it clear that the actions were indeed criminal and not at all “understandable”.
Not to mention that the torturer’s testimony would then be available.
Did they pretend AZ would give up something on, say, the 73rd session that he hadn’t on the 49th? This is just sick.
Goss in particular is one critic Mr. Obama could ignore. He was a “fixer”, brought in to geld the CIA so that it would be more amenable to being ridden by Mr. Cheney. His selection of his top staff, and the ill-informed and ill-considered way in which he let his inexperienced congressional aides slice and dice CIA staff and procedures was appalling.
Mr. Goss was the typical CEO brought in, among other objectives, to encourage as many staff as possible to leave. He had little independent standing or force of personality to actually manage the CIA as an essential, independent agency. He made it more dependent on instructions from the OVP. That was a routine play executed in most of the federal bureaucracy’s top agencies early in Mr. Bush’s tenure.
The warning to Goss – a competent mid-level bureaucrat but not executive material – about the torture tapes sounds like a version of “Who will rid me of this priest?”. It almost guaranteed that he would read the mixed message and do what was implied by its Side B.
Waterboarding a hundred times? That’s sadism, the deriving of pleasure via the intentional infliction of pain and suffering on another human being. The man would have been broken and beyond “use”. When it came time to do the fiftieth, sixtieth or seventieth waterboarding, what information would he have not yet spilled?
The constant recourse to waterboarding suggests desperation. They had tried everything and nothing was working, in the sense that they had broken the man but not elicited from him information they were sure he had.
That description suggests torture was an end in itself. The definition of a war crime. Little wonder these men are so afraid. They should be.
It’s possible that the CIA was inflating the number of waterboardings to please the idiots in Washington. It’s hard to reconcile those numbers with the testimony of AZ and KSM in the ICRC report.
When all else fails, rig the body count.
That number comes from the IG report which, in the case of AZ at least, comes from the actual tapes.
Or perhaps there is a mixture of ways to count the “Incidents”. If each waterboarding is considered an incident within a “session”…you might have different numbers. They might waterboard someone repeatedly for an hour, with breaks between to allow questioning and a response…then another incident. Still it’s hard to claim that 87 or 187 could occur 3-4 rounds. That would be 20 events of waterboarding for Al Zubyadeh per round and over 40 for KSM. Let’s say you did one every 10 seconds with ridiculously short break for a single question. KSM supposedly “broke” after 90 seconds.
Because 911 is a lie.
Do the videos of KSM’s torture still exist, as far as we know? (On the assumption that all the CIA “interrogations” were taped)
It’s time for the ACLU, CCR, and the American Bar Association to say loudly and publicly that the “decommissioning” of the secret prisons and any destruction of documents, images, or any other material relating to them will be considered obstruction of justice.
Even with Obama’s and Holder’s and Panetta’s “go forth and sin no more” promises, no one can give a promise not to prosecute for obstruction of justice.
There’s a confused article on all this in the NYT. (h/t to Laura Rozen)
I say it’s confused because it jumbles up the “political types came up with the idea of waterboarding Zuybaydah” with the “and they insisted on one more waterboarding after it was obviously a bust” truths.
It’s time to revisit the Zuybaydah torture timeline now that the ICRC report and torture memos have been released. I think I’ve been wrong about when the waterboarding (as opposed to the other torture techniques) started. I need to spend some more time cross-referencing the FBI testimony with these new documents, but it looks like the CIA was flat out lying about how they got the Padilla story out of Zuybaydah. This is really difficult because Zuybaydah, who, oddly enough, appears to be telling the truth, can’t remember the timeline very well because he was tortured AND there are competing interests with the US government who are telling different lies about what happened.
The entire purpose of the torture was to feed more plots to AbuZ and to KSM and then parade them as “intelligence” gained.
That’s part of why I’m asking about KSM tapes; they absolutely demonstrate what the torture was for.
Yes, that’s an utterly confused story.
I’m going back to hit another one–and potentially that one–later today.
This is all so appalling on so many levels.
For example, one thing about waterboarding: basically, it marches straight up to the line (and probably over it) of suffocation, which means the brain is being deprived of oxygen, which means death of brain cells. To do this repeatedly, scores of times (more than 80 times on two prisoners) means slowly killing the organ that one wants to get information from. If you’ve been waterboarded more than a few dozen times, just what the heck did they think that would do to the prisoner’s brain???
Obviously, they weren’t thinking appropriately or with knowledge. Also obviously, when done so many times, waterboarding becomes a sadistic instrument of punishment rather than any genuine attempt to get useful information.
And yet they supposedly had medical supervision. What were these “doctors” thinking?
Those guys are on the level of Mengele. They are monsters of the same type as the Nazi war criminals. They SHOULD be prosecuted. Mercilessly.
Bob in HI
I suggest we get the doctors in front of Congress, because (apparently) they were observers and not participants. So they can not invoke 5th amendment protections. Ask them about the details of each and every episode. And if they refuse, go after their medical licenses.
We may never get the lawyers and higher-ups, but the doctors are held to a much higher standard, and I think being known as the doctor who was so deeply involved in torture would damage future employment.
Have all the members of both intelligence committees had access to the CIA IG’s report (2004)?
It’s unclear. One of the reasons they destroyed the torture tapes in 2005 is that Jello Jay was asking for the underlying documents that went into the IG report, so we know he saw it, or at least parts of it.
2/3 – now go back and look at the situation where Congress and the American Public were being told, often in very parsing language, that there were 3 waterboardings. How many lawyers with professional duties of candor, to Congress at least, allowed the misrepresenatations without correcting the record?
That’s the kind of thing that it’s been clear has been going on for a long long time and its why Daniel Levin actually stands out for doing what law and professional standards required – he corrected the record.
As the officials came forward trying to give the pretense that a) waterboarding was so very effective they had to use it and b) they only used it 3 times (parsed as 3 people or 3 situations etc.) and looky what they got in those “3 instances” – they saved the world –
– as that was going on we know that there were people associated with the IG report who knew better and said nothing. There may have even been members of the Intel committee who had access to the report and who knew better, they allowed sister committees to receive misinformation and/or their own public record to include misinformation. But on the attorney front we know that Ashcroft knew differently – his DAGs Thompson and Comey likely knew differently (esp with Comey’s involvement reviewing the Zubaydah info prior to the Padilla press conf he gave); Gonazles knew differently; Bellinger likely knew differently; Muller knew differently; Rizzo knew differently; Goldsmith knew differently; Bradbury especially knew differently; and Levin knew differently.
Only Levin spoke.
That’s beyond sad.
Ah.
I’ve been trying to figure out why Hayden has been so insistent about the memos.
And that’s almost certainly it–he’s the guy who made those assurances about “three” uses of the waterboard.
Uh-oh. “The United Nation’s top torture investigator has suggested it is illegal under International law for President Barack Obama to announce that the United States government has no intention of prosecuting low-level CIA officers who carried out torture sanctioned by the Bush Administration.”
http://rawstory.com/08/blog/20…..nal-law/#-
http://tinyurl.com/c8v8nr
By making that declaration, Mr. Obama is saying he intends to breach the US’s legal obligations under domestic and international law.
Mr. Obama may be triangulating in his Rahmian way. Republicans will support him to a man and a Bachmann. Democratic Wasserman-Schulzes will also climb aboard in his defense, using the false meme that furriners can’t push us’n around with their fancy lawyering. While persuasive to the unthinking crowd, that PR line ignores that the obligations at issue are part of US constitutional, treaty and statute laws.
The temperature, it seems, is rising.
I need to spend some more time cross-referencing the FBI testimony with these new documents, but it looks like the CIA was flat out lying about how they got the Padilla story out of Zuybaydah.
More on this please. I have never been comfortable with Padilla as the dirty bomber. Interestingly enough, British officials have come out recently and said that they now believe the threat of a dirty bomb is greater than before.
I wonder what has made the Brits say this, while we have heard very little about this in the US. Sheldon Whitehouse, incidentally, recently mentioned changes in technology related to dirty bombs, but I haven’t seen any details.
A part of the significance of “how” the waterboarding was done is that, to give him some kind of due, Yoo made a point of discussing that it would be done in a way so that there was basically no chance of water entering the airways (turning the simulated drowning into actual drowning and opening up the pneumonia and other issues). The sanitized reference to using “large volumes” seems to me to be a way of getting around the fact that they were sending water down the air passages – something very specifically called “water torture” in the Hilao v. Marcos case.
And remember, they switched to using saline for precisely that reason.
This post of mine (just up) is for you, Mary:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsme…..ruelty.php
It discusses the psychologist’s roles. And why I think the lower level folks can’t be brought to trial – they are too traumatized!
There seems little doubt that as applied in the field, waterboarding involved water entering the airways. That would seem the whole point; once it does, it induces panic within seconds. Otherwise, why use the water? Possibly to create the fear that it would be inhaled, but that’s a nuance not likely to withstand Cheney’s temper or the stress of field ops.
The legal opinion’s reliance on “no water entering the airways” seems a way to reach the desired conclusion – “Go Ahead and Do It” (in Condi Rice’s pat phrase) – based on a factual assumption hardly ever likely to prevail. (See Marcy’s point about switching to saline, which must have been a recommendation from co-opted medical staff that knew water was routinely entering the airways.)
The writers of these legal opinions must have hoped that that nuance would save their law licenses. I hope not.
Query: Are there any women (other than GI Janes of Abu Ghraib) imlicated as lawyers, Torturing CIA or Contractors?
I ask because this is barbarious, sadist, clerical, perongraphic.
Well, two of the women in the chain of legal authorization for Gitmo were women.
And there are allegations women were used in sexual positions with HVDs.
And what about Condi Rice? She watched the torture broadcasts!
Yes, Condi Rice! Do we know the names of the Gitmo women in the chain of command?
There had to be many people working in shifts, to do the physical work of torture. How many people were in a torture room? How large a group of torturers are/were trained and deployed?
Gannon/Guckert was servicing the WH audience after each torture video showing….
Connell was the IT whiz, why did I think rigging elections was his only task
Both AZ and KSM report various women being involved in their interrogations, as do most other detainee statements. Then, you have to remember the story about the woman at the CIA CTC who pushed to keep El-Masri in detention after they figured out he was the wrong guy. She prolonged his suffering for months.
Slapping and exposure when nude is much more humiliating when a member of the opposite sex is performing it or even is present.
NYT is claiming that the argument over the waterboarding for Z was for the first waterboarding
That would very much go to pointing to Tenet – trying to make lil boots happy.
There are some sick aspects referenced in the NYT article that add a layer. For one thing, they say that during the summer of 02, interrogators had already discovered that Z wasn’t the No. 3 or 4 al-Qaeda leader. But despite that knowledge, Yoo’s memo references a specific representation by Rizzo to the contrary and also say the memo can’t be relied up on if those factual representations are not correct.
And apparently there was a big party for the last waterboarding – a nifty little show and tell, for the guys who had nothing to add to the questioning but just wanted to watch the crazy guy who had been broken by dozens of other waterboardings get his.
senior agency officials, still persuaded, as they had told President George W. Bush and his staff, that he was an important Qaeda leader, insisted that he must know more.
What is the thinking here about the existence and continued availability of tapes of the torture of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed?
oops 14/27 – I think my 33 link is the one you guys are going to dig deepering into. I think the convolution may be the spin that Bradbury’s memo adds. If the on the ground interrogators thought the first waterboarding was uncalled for bc he was compliant – Bradbury is parsing to say that only when there is that on the ground determination of noncompliance would there have not necessarily – under the standards of his and Yoo’s memos – not be a justifications.
But then looky looky – those guys were “wrong” bc he did come up with something (to make the waterboarding stop). And he came up with something every time he was waterboarded. That’s where Bradbury goes off into bushes to unzip over how you don’t need to actually GET good info based on a real and current threat to mean it was ok to torture, bc gosh golly, you just never know when some tidbit that someone being tortured gives up might end up being corroborative of something else someone else being tortured said and if you just keep gathering all that info (but see, e.g., destruction of tapes) then you might some day end up with something that was worth knowing.
So it could be that the real fight was over the very first waterboarding, then since he kept coming up with “something” during each session (even though it appears most of it was stuff he made up to quit being waterboarded) it cut the guys arguing against the waterboarding off at the knees – see, you guys were wrong, he did have “more” to give up.
I don’t know how the timelines on Zubaydah’s torture work with Padilla’s May,2002 arrest, but the other source for the material witness warrant that the FBI handed off to Mukasey was supposedly Binyam Mohamed. He was picked up in Pakistan in April of 2002. He alleges that his torture started then, in Pakistan. He wasn’t shipped to Morocco until July, 2002. It was June, 2002 when Padilla was handed off by the SDNY to be disappeaered into military detention without habeas. August 2002 the Yoo memo, where he also mentions oral advice given in July.
34 – “That would seem the whole point; once it does, it induces panic within seconds. Otherwise, why use the water? “
There you have to go to the memo and Rizzo’s representations. He and some SERE source he supposedly relies upon explain that they don’t get water in the airways and the the panic comes as a result of a CO2 change induced by the wet washcloths etc.
The panic would be induced by the threat of suffocation and the body’s responses to its precursors, including, as you say, a rise in CO2 level, which increases the urgency of the inhalation reflex. We are, of course, made to work that way, which is well understood by those designing these tortures.
Methods of waterboarding vary. The “wet dishrag” in the mouth supposedly seals the airway better than a dry one, though keeping it damp instead of soaking seems pretty nuanced. Besides, having the object in the mouth provides the victim a tiny bit of control that torture is designed to strip away from them. The dishrag is tangible, it can be bitten, sucked on, manipulated. (Even as it intensifies the gag reflex.) Raw water removes that minimal level of control from the victim. The price and consequence is that it’s inhaled.
Relying on sterilized descriptions of how this works, and assuming it is done in the field the same way, is Eichmannesque pedantry. Daniel Levin didn’t rely on it, had himself waterboarded, and immediately concluded it was torture. He did not remain long at Fredo’s DOJ.
10/16 – you also have to keep in mind that Yoo’s original 20 minutes, which became 12 minutes in Bradbury’s memo, for a waterboarding “session” could each include multiple waterboardings that were not to exceed 40 seconds per application. Although there is the print account of the minute and a half for KSN (which is also garbled up with a ‘then we didn’t need to again’ which doesn’t walk the line with reference to 100+ waterboardings in the memos)
You had this pegged from the beginning – there was indeed a more sinister motive to the tapes’ destruction than the mere whim of Jose Rodriguez, Jr.
who would Jebus torture ???
some people are gonna have to decide if they are republicans or christians
Extremists are Christians because of fear, Republicans because of fear, and torturers because of fear.
The love and widom of Jesus has nothing to do with their motives.
23 – and of course Obama isn’t factoring in what that does to other nations on both intel sharing and extradition issues. He factors in all the “gosh, you can’t demoralize your torturers, you need for our children to be proud of our torture and not turn against it like the did napalming and My Lais” but not all the other collateral damage that he’s recklessly creating.
29 – yep, wearing his uniform as he did it.
32 -thanks, I’m going to read it now. While I haven’t thought there was anything worse than the role of the lawyers, I have to admit that after reading the memos the role of the medical personnel (physicians and OMS as well as psychologists) was really repulsive. To do a mental and physical states exam that you knew was being used as the basis for an “ok” to torture – geez that’s creepy.
35 – remember that they found Ensure to be more torturous than gruel. I’m not sure that’s a good branding moment “Ensure – endorsed by the CIA as a necessary part of an effective torture program”
* Another overlay for the torture authorizations I keep going back to is that the memos acknowledge that the only way for someone to get out from it after they were “deemed” to be tortureworthy was to be “participatory” defined by Bradbury as offering up actionable intel. So if you had none, you WOULD BE tortured unless you offered something up. That something could then be used as a basis of determining someone else torturworthy …
I have to go do real work, but it’s all so frustrating on so many different levels.
Think about the teabaggers: How they rallied to vent anger against wrongs real or imagined.
Why are there no rallies over torture?
Answer: We have been turned into obedient herd animals.
Make a little noise. Eat what’s given to you. Be grateful and obedient.
The vast majority of americans have never cared that “terrorists” were tortured. They figure these guys had it coming.
Prosecution is the right thing to do, but it won’t happen- the politics are “high risk no reward”.
Owing in part to the administration’s calculated lie that whomever they captured, because they were captured, was one of the “worst of the worst”.
You touch on an important point. That attitude is one reason we tolerate such abusive conditions in many prisons, and tolerate the privatizing of them on the mistaken belief that it ultimately saves the state money.
The thing we have to get into the public mind is that it was not just the bad guys who were tortured. Some were tortured for whom there was absolutely no evidence that they were involved in terrorism. But that is always what happens at torture mills. They torture– because they can.
Bob in HI
UP to 80%
I’m surprised Andy Card could concentrate; what with Tenet in the Oval Office wearing nothing but his shirt-sleeves.
And Republicans criticized Pres. Obama for working in the Oval Office without a jacket on–disrespecting the room or something. I’m surprised Cheney allowed Tenet to be in the Oval Office without his sports coat on. Everyone else in that photo attached to this post has theirs on.
The Republicans don’t need and excuse. They’ve lowered themselves to a parody of a political party, as Fox Noise was created as a parody of broadcast news. The GOP will oppose Obama because he’s not them. They oppose not being in power, not controlling events, not immunizing themselves from liability or enriching themselves through taxpayer-financed subsidies and contracts. They’re broken, but they’ve broken our political system along with themselves.
Book Salon up at the Mothership with Joel Berg’s All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? hosted by Robin Stelly
It would be kind of nice to know what information was gained by the torture. Seems kind of one sided to only talk about the torture, and not tell what information the torture gained?
MY father beat me every friday night w/ a 1 1/2″ Leather belt. He was a bad to the bones republican.
The most severe beating i ever received was when i refused to cry.
These people are sick and need to be removed from any further government employment.
DNFTT.
Slightly OT, but related matters~
Jeff Gannon/Guckert was often seen in the WH, during the several month period for which the Bushies hid the Secret Service records of visitors, wearing military fatiges.
Mike Connell was allegedly involved in developing live links to torture rooms at certain detention facilities (know not where).
I don’t have links, but I do recall reading both of those items. Can further investigation expose the principals’ meetings involving Rice, Cheney, etc.?
How despicably small and venal the Bush administration was. How despicably small and compromised will the Obama administration if war crimes of the Bush years are not prosecuted in courts of Law. If we do not act like a nation of Laws, we are exposed as a nation of hypocrites ill suited to the prominence we have accorded ourselves. How sad is that?
Phoenix Woman’s Silo post is promoted!
Franken-Coleman Update, 04/17/09: Drag Watch, Day Three
I can’t separate Abu Ghraib from Guantanamo no matter how hard I try. I’m stuck wondering why Lynndie Englund was held responsible for her actions while everyone at the CIA and the DOJ gets a pass.