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Banned
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by aceventura3
Roachboy,
All I am saying is the law needs to be specific. I don't want to be water boarded, I don't even think I would have the ability to do it to a living being - human or animal. However, being at war is an ugly business, a life and death business. Those executing a war deserve clear and specific guidelines. If what we are saying is that we disagree on whether or not water boarding a person willing to attach a bomb to his body and explode the bomb killing himself, innocent children, women, elderly, disabled, relief workers, etc., is putting that person in "severe" pain and suffering that is one thing. I can accept that as a legitimate criticism of the administration. However, to suggest that Bush deserves to be impeached because he attempted to add clarity to the issue of torture for the CIA is something else - and I find that hard to accept.
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ace...you want "specific"?
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...040502099.html
2003 MEMO ON INTERROGATION
Permissible Assaults Cited in Graphic Detail
Drugging Detainees Is Among Techniques
Former Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo now teaches law at the University of California at Berkeley.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 6, 2008; Page A03
Thirty pages into a memorandum discussing the legal boundaries of military interrogations in 2003, senior Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo tackled a question not often asked by American policymakers: Could the president, if he desired, have a prisoner's eyes poked out?
Or, for that matter, could he have "scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance" thrown on a prisoner? How about slitting an ear, nose or lip, or disabling a tongue or limb? What about biting?
These assaults are all mentioned in a U.S. law prohibiting maiming, which Yoo parsed as he clarified the legal outer limits of what could be done to terrorism suspects as detained by U.S. authorities. <h3>The specific prohibitions, he said, depended on the circumstances or which "body part the statute specifies."
But none of that matters in a time of war, Yoo also said, because federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes by military interrogators are trumped</h3> by the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief.
The dry discussion of U.S. maiming statutes is just one in a series of graphic, extraordinary passages in Yoo's 81-page memo, which was declassified this past week. No maiming is known to have occurred in U.S. interrogations, and the Justice Department disavowed the document without public notice nine months after it was written. ....
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President Bush follows the legal opinion of the lawyer he is most in agreement with....Yoo says Bush can do whatever he wants....it's "wartime", that makes Bush the "wartime president", the "decider". WHAT "SPECIFIC" WOULD MATTER, ace?
This is a better description than I could write myself, making the argument that it is time for the house to form an impeachment investigation committee:
Quote:
http://troutfishing.dailykos.com/ From April 10 entry:
....Yesterday an ABC news story incriminated top Bush Administration officials Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Ashcroft and Powell, in discussing highly specific details of proposed torture techniques, in National Security Council meetings, and then approving those techniques as policy through the NSC. <h5>There's a problem with this however ; the president is the head of the NSC, chairs certain meetings and, crucially, is the only one with authority to sign off</h5> on key National Security Council policies and decisions.
That's not surprising; it's the very role of the chief executive in American government and if the NSC, not to mention the Justice Department, could somehow operate quasi-independently from the president American Democracy would fall apart. That's American government 101; the president is head of the executive branch and functions as, put so charmingly by George W. Bush, "the decider".
That's an accurate description. The president is the ultimate "decider" of the executive branch and it also happens that, as president, George W. Bush is the head of the National Security Council, "the decider" for all key NSC decisions.
In other words, George E. Lowe suggested to me, if Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and other in the administration authorized US policy on torture without Bush's clearance they staged, in effect, a virtual coup :
bizarrely, the ABC story neglects to mention that the NSC is an executive body which helps formulate national security policy and that, at the head of it, the final authority who signs off on the national policy documents the NSC generates, the final authority who signs off on NSC policy documents, NSC resolutions, is the president: George W. Bush, the decider.
For a description of how that process works, listen to part two of my latest interview with George E. Lowe, part 2 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgCRANYYonw
Last week law professor Jonathan Turley suggested that the Yoo memos pointed to the White House, and now ABC reports that the "most senior Bush administration officials" discussed and approved specific torture techniques. As ABC news <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/story?id=4583256&page=1">reported yesterday</a> April 9, 2008:
<h5>In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.</h5>
But based on my interviews George E. Lowe the ABC story amounts to what the CIA calls "limited hang out", because the strong likelihood is that George W. Bush himself signed off on torture.
The ABC story says Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Ashcroft and Powell discussed highly specific details and also authorized the torture policy. In an interview last year, Former CIA Director George Tenet stated that "It [the suggested torture techniques] was legal according to the Attorney General" and "it was authorized."
Tenet did not say who authorized the torture and although the ABC story notes the Justice Dept. had issued a 'top secret' memo declaring the "enhanced" torture methods to be legal such a ruling, on the supposed legality of the torture methods, does not indicate that the "authorization" Tenet referred to came from the Justice Department. Indeed, evidence points rather to the National Security Council and the White House.
Regardless of the Justice Department ruling, Tenet was apparently unwilling to implement the torture techniques without the additional legal cover of direct orders to do so from the White House. Tenet has referred to the "golden shield" which protects CIA agents his multiple trips to the National Security Council and the White House, on the torture issue, indicate he was was anxious to get as much legal cover for his people as possible.
As ABC details, Tenet "wanted reassurance his agents would be protected" went to the White House "again and again". That in turn suggests Tenet knew that using the torture techniques promoted by the administration would violate the Geneva Conventions and amount to war crimes.
The ABC story indicates that the Justice Department bears some of the culpability for the torture policy, and it also specifically implicates Condaleeza Rice and Dick Cheney, but ABC's coverage fundamentally muddies the nature of the power relationships.
The suggestion inherent to ABC's coverage is that the Justice Department and also the National Security Council operate as independent or qausi independent branches of government, somehow autonomous from presidential control. That is wildly misleading.
As George E. Lowe has informed me this is not how the NSC works - the NSC does not operate independently from the president. The president chairs NSC meetings and he signs off on NSC resolutions. Here's how <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/">the White House itself describes the National Security Council</a>:
The National Security Council is chaired by the President. <h5>Its regular attendees (both statutory and non-statutory) are the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the statutory military advisor to the Council, and the Director of National Intelligence is the intelligence advisor. The Chief of Staff to the President, Counsel to the President, and the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy are invited to attend any NSC meeting. The Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget are invited to attend meetings pertaining to their responsibilities. The heads of other executive departments and agencies, as well as other senior officials, are invited to attend meetings of the NSC when appropriate.
National Security Council's Function<h5>
The National Security Council is the President's principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy matters<h5> with his senior national security advisors and cabinet officials. Since its inception under President Truman, the function of the Council has been to advise and assist the President on national security and foreign policies. The Council also serves as the President's principal arm for coordinating these policies among various government agencies.</h5>
The Federation of American Scientists has a <a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/NSChistory.htm">highly detailed description of the function and history of the NSC as an institution.</a> The FAS account corresponds very closely with the account given to me by George E. Lowe right down to the specific sorts of terminology used.
The most salient point is this :
<h3>The National Security Council does not formulate policy independently from the president.</h3> The President chairs the NSC and is the final authority in policy formation.
Indeed, the president signs off on all key National Security Council decisions and all key NSC policy documents, and the president is the one who delegates authority so that NSC decisions and policies are implemented.
Thus, it's very likely George W. Bush signed an NSC document authorizing specific torture methods. In doing so Bush would have authorized, as official United States national policy, torture methods judged both by the Geneva Conventions, and also United States anti-torture legislation signed by Bill Clinton in the mid 1990's, to be illegal and which were treated, per the US prosecution of Japanese military officers for waterboarding, as war crimes.
As quoted by ABC, then Attorney General John Ashcroft's outburst during one of the NSC meetings on torture highlights the legally dubious nature of the torture techniques: "WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE ! --HISTORY WILL NOT JUDGE THIS KINDLY."
[Below: part one (10 minutes) of my interview with George E. Lowe. Bottom and also a (5 minute) video based on an excerpt from a previous interview with Lowe]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8TI_HZ_sdk
Based on his 30 years of experience in government, as someone who has written National Security Council decision memos and is quite familiar with the National Security Council, George E. Lowe last week walked me through the process by which the Bush Administration torture program was probably first conceived of, as a legal opinion, and then turned into a National Security Council action memo, which presented a range of options, that got sent up the line to Bush.
As Lowe describes in the interview, "it's an art form", the writing of these things and the idea is to craft them in such a way (and to whisper in his ear to this end) so the president picks the right option.
Then, that act memo gets converted, probably, into a National Security Council resolution or other NSC document and it sets the official government policy and, as Lowe stresses, that's what this is all about, "it's about controlling the <h3>policy"</h3>.
Here's the basic situation, as George Lowe describes it to me:
The torture techniques that were devised, sanctioned and implemented by the Bush Administration are widely recognized to violate the Geneva Conventions and international law, and this presented a bureacratic problem because the torture program, implemented at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and throughout a network of secret US detention centers established around the world, was massive.
The torture program was global policy, there were lots of people involved in implementing it. So, simply on a "cover your ass" basis, civil servants and people in the professional military, whomever was involved in the program in any capacity, needed the best possible legal cover. That's the subtext to Former CIA Director Gerge Tenet's resistance to authorizing torture based on a mere ruling from the Justice Department. Tenet wanted direct orders from the White House and he appears to have gotten them as, described in the ABC story, Condaleeza Rice instructed Tenet "This is your baby. Go do it!". Rice was delegating the authority to Tenet and ordering him to implement the new NSC torture policy.
As Lowe explains, is about process, there's an established process by which government policy gets set, and then authority to implement that policy gets delegated, from Bush down the line.
According to Lowe, the only person who has the level of authority necessary to sign off on National Security memos and resolutions is the president. So, at the White House level, <h5>there are two possibilities: Bush signed off on the torture policy or top members of his administration, Cheney, Rumsfeld and maybe others illegally usurped the authority, in effect staging a virtual coup. That would also indicate the president to be oblivious and incompetent, and we have to take such a possibility seriously, yes, but the greater likelihood is that George W. Bush signed off on torture and a National Security policy document got generated.</h5> Then Bush delegated to Rumsfeld the authority to implement the torture policy and from there Rumsfeld delegated down the line.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPtePKZs9kQ
<img src="http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg53/lauraderrick/020207p1.jpg">
<img src="http://i245.photobucket.com/albums/gg53/lauraderrick/020207.jpg">
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Last edited by host; 04-16-2008 at 10:02 AM..
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