Cross posted from the Torture Reports.
No wonder Dick Cheney has been appearing so frequently on FOX News. It’s an attempt for him to defend his deplorable record and to distract the media and the public from the truth. Cheney has been attacking President Obama right and left in order to change the subject about torture.
You see, reports reveal that Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice signed off on torture.
http://news.yahoo.com/...
A newly declassified narrative of the Bush administration's advice to the CIA on harsh interrogations shows that the small group of Justice Department lawyers who wrote memos authorizing controversial interrogation techniques were operating not on their own but with direction from top administration officials, including then-Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
At the same time, the narrative suggests that then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell were largely left out of the decision-making process.
A recently released Senate report also indicates that the Bush Administration began planning for torture in 2001 well before the DOJ issued its supposedly legal justifications for it in 2002.
The Senate Armed Services Committee has just released an exhaustive review of torture under the Bush administration that, among other revelations, torpedoes the notion that the administration only chose torture as a last resort. Bush officials have long argued that they turned to coercive interrogations in 2002 only after captured al-Qaida suspects wouldn't talk, but the report shows the administration set the wheels in motion soon after 9/11. The Bush White House began planning for torture in December 2001, set up a program to develop the interrogation techniques by the next month, and the military and the CIA began training interrogators in coercive practices in early 2002, before they had any high-value al-Qaida suspects or any trouble eliciting information from detainees.
As in the case of the non-existent WMDs and ties between Al-Qaida and Iraq, The Bush Administration knowingly misled us when making its case for torture. Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and other top U.S. officials wanted to use torture methods on suspected terrorists immediately following 9/11.
To hear former President Bush tell it, you would think the United States only turned to the techniques in desperation. When Bush announced the existence of the CIA's interrogation program in September 2006, for example, he argued that suspected al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah stopped cooperating with interrogators after his capture on March 28, 2002, forcing the agency to get rough. "We knew that Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives," Bush said. "But he stopped talking. As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation," the president said. "And so, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures."
A General who had investigated Abu Gharaib said Bush officials committed war crimes.
he Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.
The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices.
"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
McClatchy Newspapers did a five-part series on torture this past week. A video clip about the McClatchy Newspapers’ investigation, "Guantanamo: Beyond the Law" can be seen at the link above.
Now we know for certain that torture was neither necessary nor the fault of a "few bad apples" as we had been led to believe by the Bush Administration. Once again, the Bush Administration lied to us.
According to the McClatchy Newspapers article cited at the top, last summer Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-VA), former Chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Committee, had urged the Committee to draft a document that detailed authorized "harsh interrogation techniques," i.e. torture. Officials within the Bush Administration contributed significantly to this document. The Bush Administration, however, had refused to declassify it.
The document also reveals:
— The CIA thought al Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah was withholding information about an imminent threat as of April 2002 , but didn't get authorization to use various interrogation techniques on him until more than three months later.
Key Senate Intelligence Committee members were briefed on the techniques used on Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohammed in 2002 and 2003.
The Director of Central Intelligence in the spring of 2003 sought a reaffirmation of the legality of the interrogation methods. Cheney, Rice, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales were among those at a meeting where it was decided that the policies would continue. Rumsfeld and Powell weren't.
The CIA briefed the Rumsfeld and Powell on interrogation techniques in September 2003. Administration officials had ongoing concerns about the legality of waterboarding as they continued to justify its legitimacy.
Why Torture was not necessary.
On April 22 in an editorial in the New York Times former special supervisory FBI agent Ali Soufan in his article
My Tortured Decision.
writes:
FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned.
Mr. Soufan discloses that he and another FBI agent, with a CIA agent present, had interrogated Abu Zubaydah from March, 2002 through July of that year, before harsh interrogation methods were used. Mr. Soufan and his colleagues had been successful in extracting information from the prisoner by using traditional means. The FBI learned, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.
There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.
Torture and its horrible consequences.
One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.
When Mr. Soufan objected to using harsh methods his boss, Robert Mueller, pulled him out of the interrogations because the "FBI doesn’t do that." Unfortunately for his CIA colleagues who had also balked at employing such methods, they were told to continue.
President Obama has agreed not to prosecute these folks in the CIA, but they are not off of the hook. Some will likely pay a psychological and emotional price that, for some, will be hard to bear. Torture takes a deep if not a tragic toll on everyone involved. One would have to be cruel sadist to not be affected by it.
Meanwhile, the lies from former officials from the Bush Administration continue.
Karl Rove and others have ginned up a successful outcome for torture stating that harsh methods forced Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to confess that there would be another 9/11 type attack in Los Angeles.
Jed Lewison here at Daily Kos captured of video clip of Karl Rove in which he openly lied about the foiled L.A. attack. Karl knew he could get away with lying on Republican run FOX News.
According to Jed, Rove pushed a lie that contains threads of truth.
As Timothy Noah pointed out in Slate, the Los Angeles attack was foiled in February of 2002. KSM was not captured until March of 2003, however — more than a year later.
Karl Rove and his ilk have been lying for so many years that they don’t even know they are doing it anymore.
Karl and his Republican Party of No, Never, Lies Torture and Tax Cats for The Rich can stay mired in their mid 20th century bubble. This past Election told us the vast majority of us want to move onward and upward into the 21st century.
Now that we know what we know about the abuses of the Bush Administration, where do we go from here?
On April 23 in The New York Times Paul Krugman wrote in his editorial:
Reclaiming America’s Soul
Krugman explains why we must absolutely examine the past eight years in which there was a complete betrayal of everything we stand for. We owe it to ourselves to regain our moral ideals.
No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. "This government does not torture people," declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.
He reminds us of the American capability for multi-tasking. We all do it every day all of the time. An investigation into torture does not mean the government would come to a screeching halt. The only time that happened was the time in which Newt Gringrich threw a tantrum because he was angry at Bill Clinton.
Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Peter Orszag, the budget director, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to reform health care. Steven Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn’t, and indeed shouldn’t, be involved. All he would have to do is let the Justice Department do its job — which he’s supposed to do in any case — and not get in the way of any Congressional investigations.
I don’t know about you, but I think America is capable of uncovering the truth and enforcing the law even while it goes about its other business.
Of course we are. We are not living in a Banana Republic, after all, despite the attempts of the Bush Administration and its big moneyed fat cats and neonuts to get us there. We managed to survive after the Watergate and Iran Contra hearings. Indeed we are stronger because of those investigations.
Krugman believes that President Obama may be concerned about losing consensus among Republican lawmakers if we were to explore the abuses of the Bush Administration. Krugman rightly argues that Republicans have been blocking everything the President has tried to do since day one and they will continue to do so. In other words, there is no consensus.
But the answer to that is, what political consensus? There are still, alas, a significant number of people in our political life who stand on the side of the torturers. But these are the same people who have been relentless in their efforts to block President Obama’s attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change. The president cannot lose their good will, because they never offered any.
I completely agree. Let's ignore the obstructionists and reclaim our moral ideals.
We should investigate all abuses, punish those who broke the law and move on.
As recent Pulitzer Prize recipient Gene Robinson wrote:
The many roads of inquiry into the Bush administration's abusive "interrogation techniques" all lead to one stubborn, inconvenient fact: Torture is not just immoral but also illegal. This means that once we learn the whole truth, the law will oblige us to act on it.