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Banned
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Is Waterboarding, Torture? Has Pres. Bush Now Admitted to Approving Torture?
Bush: <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9956644/">"We do not torture" terror suspects</a>
Bush defends interrogation practices: <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-11-07-bush-terror-suspects_x.htm">"We do not torture"</a>
<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4415132.stm">US does not torture</a>, Bush insists
<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/08/wbush08.xml">We do not torture detainees</a>, says Bush
Bush: <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/07/AR2005110700772.html">"We do not torture"</a>
Quote:
http://www.kansas.com/611/story/370309.html
....ABC News, which broke the story Wednesday, reported that some of the principals understood the moral swamp into which they were wading.
"Why are we talking about this in the White House?" Ashcroft is quoted as saying at one meeting. "History will not judge this kindly."
Nor will history judge the American people kindly if we look the other way.
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Quote:
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPoli...4635175&page=1
Bush Aware of Advisers' Interrogation Talks
President Says He Knew His Senior Advisers Discussed Tough Interrogation Methods
By JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, HOWARD L. ROSENBERG and ARIANE de VOGUE
April 11, 2008—
President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers 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 News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. <h3>"And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."</h3>
As first reported by ABC News 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 CIA.
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 Dick 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.
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.
ABC News' Diane Sawyer sat down with Powell this week for a previously scheduled interview and asked him about the ABC News report.
Powell said that he didn't have "sufficient memory recall" about the meetings and that he had participated in "many meetings on how to deal with detainees." .................................. <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/Story?id=4635175&page=2">[2]</a>
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Quote:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1007/6647.html
Roosevelt was right: Waterboarding wrong
By: Daniel A. Rezneck
Oct 31, 2007 07:13 PM EST
....The Filipinos fought back savagely against the American occupation, committing many atrocities.
American soldiers responded with what was called the “water cure” or “Chinese water torture.” As described in a 1902 congressional hearing: “A man is thrown down on his back and three or four men sit on his arms and legs and hold him down, and either a gun barrel or a rifle barrel or a carbine barrel or a stick as big as a belaying pin ... is simply thrust into his jaws, ... and then water is poured onto his face, down his throat and nose, ... until the man gives some sign of giving in or becomes unconscious. ... His suffering must be that of a man who is drowning but who cannot drown.”
Edmund Morris, in the second volume of his brilliant biography of Theodore Roosevelt, recounts how a master politician took over the situation. Roosevelt met with his Cabinet and demanded a full briefing on the Philippine situation. Elihu Root, the secretary of war, reported that an officer accused of the water torture had been ordered to stand trial.
Dissatisfied, Roosevelt sent a cable to the commander of the U.S. Army in the Philippines, stating:
“The president desires to know in the fullest and most circumstantial manner all the facts, ... for the very reason that the president intends to back up the Army in the heartiest fashion in every lawful and legitimate method of doing its work; he also intends to see that the most vigorous care is exercised to detect and prevent any cruelty or brutality and that men who are guilty thereof are punished. Great as the provocation has been in dealing with foes who habitually resort to treachery, murder and torture against our men, nothing can justify or will be held to justify the use of torture or inhuman conduct of any kind on the part of the American Army.”
Roosevelt also ordered the court-martial of the American general on the island of Samar, where some of the worst abuses had occurred. He did so “under conditions which will give me the right of review.” The court-martial cleared the general of the charges, found only that he had behaved with excessive zeal and “admonished” him against repetition.
Roosevelt responded by disregarding the verdict of the court-martial and ordering the general’s dismissal from the Army. Morris wrote that Roosevelt’s decision “won universal praise” from Democrats, who congratulated him for acknowledging cruelty in the Philippine campaign, and from Republicans, who said that he had “upheld the national honor.”....
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Quote:
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigat...ory?id=1356870
History of an Interrogation Technique: Water Boarding
New Debate Sparked on What Constitutes Torture
Nov. 29, 2005 —
CIA Director Porter Goss maintained this week that the CIA does not employ methods of torture. In doing so, he opened a new debate over exactly what constitutes torture -- especially when it comes to the harshest of the CIA's six secret interrogation techniques, known as "water boarding."
The water board technique dates back to the 1500s during the Italian Inquisition. A prisoner, who is bound and gagged, has water poured over him to make him think he is about to drown.
Current and former CIA officers tell ABC News that they were trained to handcuff the prisoner and cover his face with cellophane to enhance the distress. According to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., himself a torture victim during the Vietnam War, the water board technique is a "very exquisite torture" that should be outlawed.
"Torture is defined under the federal criminal code as the intentional infliction of severe mental pain or suffering," said John Sifton, an attorney and researcher with the organization Human Rights Watch. "That would include water boarding."
On "Good Morning America" today, Goss told ABC News' Charles Gibson that the CIA does not inflict pain on prisoners.
Yet, in response to Gibson's inquiry if water boarding would come under the heading of torture, Goss simply replied, "I don't know."
Water boarding was designated as illegal by U.S. generals in Vietnam 40 years ago. A photograph that appeared in The Washington Post of a U.S. soldier involved in water boarding a North Vietnamese prisoner in 1968 led to that soldier's severe punishment.
"The soldier who participated in water torture in January 1968 was court-martialed within one month after the photos appeared in The Washington Post, and he was drummed out of the Army," recounted Darius Rejali, a political science professor at Reed College.
Earlier in 1901, the United States had taken a similar stand against water boarding during the Spanish-American War when an Army major was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor for water boarding an insurgent in the Philippines.
"Even when you're fighting against belligerents who don't respect the laws of war, we are obliged to hold the laws of war," said Rejali. "And water torture is torture."
This morning, Goss insisted that the CIA and its officers are not breaking U.S. law.
"We do debriefings because debriefings are the nature of our business -- to get information, and we do all that, and we do it in a way that does not involve torture because torture is counterproductive," Goss said.
The CIA maintains its interrogation techniques are in legal guidance with the Justice Department. And current and former CIA officers tell ABC News there is a presidential finding, signed in 2002, by President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft approving the techniques, including water boarding.
ABC News' Maddy Sauer, Vic Walter, and Rich Esposito contributed to this report.
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/wa...3g&oref=slogin
February 23, 2008
Waterboarding Focus of Inquiry by Justice Dept.
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department revealed Friday that its internal ethics office was investigating the department’s legal approval for waterboarding of Qaeda suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency and was likely to make public an unclassified version of its report.
The disclosure by H. Marshall Jarrett, the head of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, was the first official acknowledgment of an internal review of the legal memorandums the department has issued since 2002 that authorized waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods.
Mr. Jarrett’s report could become the first public accounting for legal advice that endorsed methods widely denounced as torture by human rights groups and legal authorities. His office can refer matters for criminal prosecution; legal experts said the most likely outcome was a public critique of the legal opinions on interrogation, noting that Mr. Jarrett had the power to reprimand or to seek the disbarment of current or former Justice Department lawyers.
The cloak of secrecy that long concealed the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program and its legal underpinnings has gradually broken down.
The C.I.A. director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, publicly admitted for the first time two weeks ago that the agency used waterboarding in 2002 and 2003 in the interrogation of three Qaeda suspects but said that the technique was no longer used, and its legality under current law is uncertain. The technique, which has been used since the Spanish Inquisition and has been found illegal in the past by American courts, involves water poured into the nose and mouth to create a feeling of drowning.
After General Hayden’s acknowledgment, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey rebuffed demands for a criminal investigation of interrogators who used waterboarding or of their superiors, saying C.I.A. officers could not be prosecuted for actions the Justice Department had advised them were legal. Mr. Jarrett’s review focuses on the government lawyers who gave that advice.
Mr. Jarrett’s disclosure came as prosecutors and F.B.I. agents conduct a criminal investigation of the C.I.A.’s destruction in 2005 of videotapes of harsh interrogations and a week after Congress passed a ban on coercive interrogations, which President Bush has said he will veto.
Mr. Jarrett did not say when his investigation might conclude. He did not respond to a request on Friday for an interview.
In a letter to two Democratic senators, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Mr. Jarrett wrote that the legal advice approving waterboarding was one subject of an investigation into “the circumstances surrounding the drafting” of a Justice legal memorandum dated Aug. 1, 2002.
The document declared that interrogation methods were not torture unless they produced pain equivalent to that produced by organ failure or death. The memorandum, drafted by a Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, and signed by Jay S. Bybee, then head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, was withdrawn in 2004.
Mr. Jarrett said the investigation was also covering “related” legal memorandums prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel since 2002. That suggested the investigation would address still-secret legal opinions written in 2005 by Steven G. Bradbury, then and now the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, that gave legal approval for waterboarding and other tough methods, even when used in combination.
Mr. Jarrett said his office was “examining whether the legal advice in these memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.”
“Because of the significant public interest in this matter, O.P.R. will consider releasing to Congress and the public a nonclassified summary of our final report,” Mr. Jarrett wrote, using the initials for the Office of Professional Responsibility.
Justice Department officials said that the O.P.R. inquiry began more than three years ago and noted that it was mentioned in a Newsweek article in December 2004. It has since been expanded, the officials said, to cover more recent legal opinions on interrogation.
Mr. Jarrett’s letter, dated Monday, came in reply to a Feb. 12 letter from Mr. Durbin and Mr. Whitehouse to him and the Justice Department’s inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, seeking an investigation into the department’s legal approval of waterboarding.
“Despite the virtually unanimous consensus of legal scholars and the overwhelming weight of legal precedent that waterboarding is illegal,” the senators wrote, “certain Justice Department officials, operating behind a veil of secrecy, concluded that the use of waterboarding is lawful. We believe it is appropriate for you to investigate the conduct of these Justice Department officials.”
Mr. Fine replied in a letter this week that the law gave Mr. Jarrett’s office responsibility for reviewing the actions of department lawyers providing legal advice. Mr. Jarrett confirmed that his office was investigating.
Mr. Jarrett reports to the attorney general and oversees only the professional conduct of Justice Department attorneys. He does not enjoy the independence or authority of Mr. Fine, who covers all aspects of Justice operations and also reports to Congress.
In 2006, when Mr. Jarrett tried to look into the Justice Department’s role in approving the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program, Mr. Bush blocked the investigation by denying Mr. Jarrett’s investigators the necessary security clearances. Mr. Fine’s office subsequently obtained the necessary clearances and began such an investigation.
Last November, days after Mr. Mukasey was confirmed as attorney general, Mr. Bush reversed course and granted clearances to Mr. Jarrett’s staffers, who began a delayed review of the legal authorization for the N.S.A. program.
Mr. Durbin and Mr. Whitehouse have been among the most outspoken critics in Congress of harsh interrogation methods. They have called on Mr. Bush to withdraw the nomination of Mr. Bradbury, author of the 2005 interrogation memorandums, as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel; he has filled the job on an acting basis since 2005.
In 2004, Mr. Durbin first proposed a ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment that Congress passed in 2005, when it was sponsored by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.
Mr. Whitehouse, a former United States attorney, said in an interview that he believed the August 2002 memo on torture, as well as classified opinions he had reviewed, fell far short of the Justice Department’s standards for scholarship. He said that in approving waterboarding, the opinions ignored both American military prosecutors’ cases against Japanese officers for waterboarding American prisoners during World War II and a federal appeals court’s decision that upheld the 1983 conviction of a Texas sheriff for using “water torture” on jail inmates.
“I’m very, very pleased that the Office of Professional Responsibility is looking into this,” Mr. Whitehouse said.
Jose Padilla, the American sympathizer of Al Qaeda serving a 17-year sentence for conspiring to help violent Muslim extremists abroad, filed a lawsuit in January against Mr. Yoo, who left Justice in 2003 to return to his job as a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The lawsuit claims Mr. Yoo’s legal opinions permitted the designation of Mr. Padilla as an enemy combatant and his interrogation using methods that amounted to torture.
Mr. Yoo, who asserted that a president during wartime has extraordinarily broad powers, was a highly influential figure in the Justice Department in the first year after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. His views found favor with Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal adviser, David S. Addington, who shared his views of presidential power.
But some of Mr. Yoo’s opinions, including the August 2002 memo on torture, were withdrawn in 2004 after Jack L. Goldsmith took over as head of the Office of Legal Counsel. Mr. Yoo could not be reached for comment Friday.
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The record indicates to me that waterboarding is a form of torture. it looks to me that president Bush approved of the discussion and methods, taking place in the white house, of interrogating prisoners, including the method of waterboarding, yet he publicly denied that the US was torturing prisoners.
Doesn't this seem a huge departure from longstanding US policy and principle? Isn't Bush's admission, grounds for impeachment, based on the precedent of a US general's court martial for the same thing happening, on his watch?
Last edited by host; 04-14-2008 at 08:19 AM..
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