After Comey, after Goldsmith rescinded the Bybee Memo on Torture, after Congress passed laws barring torture, and many more denials by Bush, yet another secret opinion was written saying torture was ok, even when done to the extreme.
But soon after Alberto R. 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
This is a long and sometimes confusing article of 5 pages. It will take a while to pick it all apart and is sometime incomplete because of it's use of un-named sources. What is does say, I believe, is even to this day the CIA is using extreme methods of torture with Bushs approval.
The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. 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.
That says that nothing has change even after Goldsmith pulled the Bybee Memo, something that had given people a sigh of relief. That hasn't lasted long has it ? It is no wonder that to this day the White House has refused to make these opinion available Congress for it's investigations.
Not only is this still happening, the Bush Admin. is back in the business of operating Black or Secret Prisons which are against the Geneva Convention. This appears to have come about after Bushs Executive Order on Enhanced Techniques in 2006.
After the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the Geneva Conventions applied to prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda, President Bush for the first time acknowledged the C.I.A.’s secret jails and ordered their inmates moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The C.I.A. 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, President 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 C.I.A. again is holding prisoners in "black sites" overseas. The executive order was reviewed and approved by Mr. Bradbury and the Office of Legal Counsel.
One thing I find interesting is that the Military is not allowed to use these methods according to their new field manual. That would leave this in the hands of the CIA exclusively.
The Army's new field manual on intelligence, approved in September, specifically bans some of the most aggressive techniques -- such as "waterboarding," beatings, sensory deprivation and depriving a detainee of food -- and draws clear boundaries for all military personnel who participate in interrogations. http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
It is time we force Bushs hand, and Nancy Pelosi's also. This is the stuff Impeachment was designed for. Be sure and read mcjoans take on what all this means for Mukasey, the person Bush wants for his new Atty. Gen. She makes some great points. http://www.dailykos.com/...