Posts Tagged ‘Bush administration’

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Obama Returns to Bush Era on Guantánamo

May 6, 2009

Andy Worthington | The Future of Freedom Foundation, May 6, 2009  

Two distressing pieces of news emerged last week regarding the Obama administration’s plans to close Guantánamo, and both were delivered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Discussing what would happen to the remaining 241 prisoners, Gates announced that the question was “still open” as to what the government should do with “the 50 to 100 — probably in that ballpark — who we cannot release and cannot try.” He also announced that the much-criticized military commission trial system, suspended for four months by Barack Obama on his first day in office, was “still very much on the table.”

Both admissions indicate that when it comes to Guantánamo, it is beginning to appear that the much-vaunted change promised by Barack Obama on the campaign trail has actually involved nothing more than imposing a closing date on Guantánamo while maintaining the Bush administration’s approach to the men still held there.

Back in Bush’s day, for example, those “who we cannot release and cannot try” were sometimes referred to as those who were “too dangerous to release but not guilty enough to prosecute” — essentially because the supposed evidence against them was the fruit of torture or other abuse.

As someone who has studied the story of Guantánamo and its prisoners in detail over the last three years, I’m aware that much of the information compiled by the Bush administration for use against the prisoners at Guantánamo was obtained through torture or coercion and is, therefore, unreliable, and that other, equally unreliable information was secured through the bribery of other prisoners.

As a National Journal investigation revealed in 2006, one prisoner, described by the FBI as a notorious liar, made false allegations against 60 prisoners in Guantánamo in exchange for more favorable treatment, and in February this year the Washington Post published the sobering tale of another informant, whose copious confessions should have set alarm bells ringing. In both cases, however, there is no indication that the officials responsible for compiling the information examined by the president’s review team have acknowledged that a substantial number of allegations against the prisoners are actually worthless.

Moreover, the defense secretary’s talk of 50 to 100 suspicious prisoners (above and beyond those regarded as demonstrably dangerous) is at odds with repeated intelligence assessments reported over the years, which have indicated that the total number of prisoners with any meaningful connection to international terrorism is between 35 and 50. To this should be added the recent revelation by Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, that “no more than a dozen or two of the detainees” held in Guantánamo ever had any worthwhile intelligence.

In addition, the defense secretary’s talk of reviving the military commissions is a distressing development for the many critics of the novel trial system invented by Dick Cheney and David Addington, who hoped that the administration would resist all calls to reinstate them, and would, instead, move the relatively few prisoners regarded as genuinely dangerous to the mainland to face trials in federal court.

However, on Saturday, after speaking to Obama administration officials, the New York Times reported that, despite declaring that, as president, he would “reject the Military Commissions Act,” and stating that “by any measure our system of trying detainees has been an enormous failure,” President Obama was indeed considering reviving the commissions.

As the Times described it,

Administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies.

As a result, they said, decision-makers were considering whether to tinker with the rules regarding the use of coercive interrogations and hearsay, in what the Times described as “walk[ing] a tightrope of granting the suspects more rights yet stopping short of affording them the rights available to defendants in American courts.”

The “tightrope” analogy, though apt, is also something of an understatement. Almost universally derided in their seven-year history, the commissions demonstrated, above all, that inventing a legal system from scratch was a poor substitute for respecting the laws which have served the Republic well for over 200 years.

Nor can it be claimed that the federal court system is incapable of dealing with terrorism cases. As was explained in a 2008 report by Human Rights First, “In Pursuit of Justice: Prosecuting Terrorism Cases in the Federal Courts” (PDF), over 100 terrorism cases have been prosecuted successfully in the federal courts in the last 15 years.

Moreover, last Thursday, as Robert Gates was telling the Senate that the military commissions were still “on the table,” the Justice Department was taking a very different line in the case of Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident who was held in extreme isolation for nearly six years without charge or trial as an “enemy combatant” in a U.S. naval brig, until he was returned to the federal justice system by the Obama administration.

As al-Marri accepted a plea agreement and admitted that he had been sent to the United States as an al-Qaeda “sleeper agent,” Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the result “reflects what we can achieve when we have faith in our criminal justice system and are unwavering in our commitment to the values upon which this nation was founded and the rule of law.”

To remove the stain that Guantánamo has left on the reputation of the United States as a nation founded on the rule of law, Mr. Holder’s words should be repeated to him every time that the administration attempts to turn back the clock to the days of George W. Bush, with its dangerous talk of finding new ways to justify holding prisoners without charge or trial and its willingness to revive a trial system despised as nothing more than a “kangaroo court.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.

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Children as Unlamented Victims of Bush’s War Crimes

May 2, 2009

By Michael Haas | Information Clearing House, May 1, 2009

Torture has received the most attention among the many war crimes of the Bush administration. But those who support Bush’s pursuit of the “war on terror” have not been impressed by recriminations over torture. Worse than torture are the murders of at least 50 prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo, but again the hard-hearted are unimpressed when those whom they perceive as terrorists receive illegal extrajudicial capital punishment.

The case for abusing children, however, is more difficult to support. The best kept secret of the Bush’s war crimes is that thousands of children have been imprisoned, tortured, and otherwise denied rights under the Geneva Conventions and related international agreements. Yet both Congress and the media have strangely failed to identify the very existence of child prisoners as a war crime. In the Islamic world, however, there is no such silence. Indeed, the prophet Mohammed was the first to counsel warriors not to harm innocent children.

The first example of war crimes against children, which are well documented, occurred during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when the children’s hospital in Kabul was bombed, its patients thereby murdered, contrary to the Red Cross Convention of 1864. Other children were killed as “collateral damage” during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, contrary to the Geneva Convention ban on indiscriminate killing in wartime, though numbers of dead are unknown. During spring 2004, during the assault on Falluja, Iraq, some 300 children, including peaceful demonstrators, were killed. Their dead bodies were filmed live on al-Jazeera Television throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

In 2008, the Bush administration reported to the UN-assisted Committee on the Rights of the Child that the United States from 2002 had detained 2,400 children in Iraq and 100 in Afghanistan, though another source claims that the figure for Afghanistan is at least 800 boys, aged 10 to 15, from whom as many as 64 were sent to Guantánamo, of which there were 21 as of May 2008. That month, the Committee upbraided the United States for charging minors with war crimes instead of treating underage persons as victims of war. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s two children, aged 7 and 9, were separately detained to intimidate him to confess.

While detained, several children have been brutalized and tortured. At Abu Ghraib, American guards videotaped Iraqi male prisoners raping young boys but took no action to stop the offenses. Perhaps the worst incident at Abu Ghraib involved a girl aged 12 or 13 who screamed for help to her brother in an upper cell while stripped naked and beaten. Iraqi journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, who heard the girl’s screams, also witnessed an ill 15-year-old who was forced to run up and down Abu Ghraib with two heavy cans of water and beaten whenever he stopped. When he finally collapsed, guards stripped and poured cold water on him. Finally, a hooded man was brought in. When unhooded, the boy realized that the man was his father, who doubtless was being intimidated into confessing something upon sight of his brutalized son.

While General Hamid Zabar was being questioned in Iraq, his interrogators decided to arrest his frail 16-year-old son in order to produce a confession. After soldiers found the boy, he was stripped, drenched with mud and water, and exposed to the cold January night while bound and driven about in the open back of a truck. When presented naked to his father, he was shivering due to hypothermia, clearly needing medical attention.

At least 25 war crimes refer specifically to child prisoners. Among the crimes are the arbitrary transfer out of their home countries, leaving their parents to wonder whether they were dead. When their locations were later revealed, parents were not allowed to contact them, even through the mail. And family members knew nothing of Hassin Bin Attash’s extraordinary rendition experience in Jordan or Ahmad Bashir’s disappearance for two years in a secret prison.

Children have been incarcerated in the same quarters as adults, contrary to the Geneva Convention. Subjected to solitary confinement, they are denied educational and recreational opportunities. Indeed, one attorney was not allowed to give his client (Omar Khadr) a copy of “Lord of the Rings” or play dominoes with him; another has been forbidden to supply his client (Mohammed Jawad) articles from the Internet. After Captain James Yee left Guantánamo on September 10, 2003, no Muslim chaplain has ever replaced him, so they have not been provided appropriate religious education.

Meanwhile, the authorities have refused to investigate or prosecute those who have abused children, and there have been no programs established to prevent prison mistreatment or to assist in their resulting post-traumatic stress. They have been denied legal counsel and a statement of reasons for their confinement upon arrival in prison, held far beyond the “speedy trial” requirement under the Geneva Conventions, coerced into confessions that may be false, and denied available exculpatory evidence, including witnesses.

In 2003, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao gave a speech on behalf of the need to rehabilitate child soldiers from Burundi, Colombia, El Salvador, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Uganda. While she spoke, several children were being abused at Guantánamo. The most famous, Mohammed Jawad and Omar Khadr, are still being held for trial at Guantánamo.

Omar Khadr’s videotaped plea for his mommy and claims of torture has been seen on television worldwide. While still wounded from battle in Afghanistan, Omar was interrogated many times, sometimes while hooded with dogs barking near him, so he confessed to stop the pain from his wounds. During interrogation at Guantánamo, Omar was shackled to the floor in stress positions until he soiled himself. His bound body was twice used as a mop to wipe his own urine mixed with pine oil after which he was refused a shower and a change of clothing. He has also been administered a brutal beating while on a hunger strike, threatened with rape, and denied pain medication.

There is some puzzlement over the reason for imprisoning Mohammad Jawad. Is it because, while at an American-run prison in Afghanistan in 2002, he has claimed that he saw Americans murdering inmates? At Guantánamo, to deprive him of sleep in order to force some sort of confession, he was shifted from one cell to another more than 100 times during two weeks in May 2004, and he remains in solitary confinement today. When he showed up in court in 2008, he was the first to wear leg shackles. During his arraignment, the judge asked him whether he accepted the assigned military defense attorney as his lawyer. After replying in the negative, the judge asked whether he knew another lawyer. His reply to the Kafkaesque inquiry was “Since I don’t know any lawyer, how can I have them represent me? . . . I should be given freedom so that I can find a lawyer.” His request to hunt for a lawyer was then denied.

The mistreatment of children is something not so funny that has been neglected on the road to investigations of and calls for prosecution of those responsible for torture. George W. Bush has never been asked about the abuse of children in American-run prisons in the “war on terror.” It is high time for Bush and others to be held accountable for what is arguably the most egregious of all their war crimes—the abuse and death of children, who should never have been arrested in the first place.

Michael Haas’s book George W. Bush, War Criminal? – The Bush Administration’s Liability for 269 War Crimes is available here

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‘Abu Ghraib US prison guards were scapegoats for Bush’ lawyers claim

May 2, 2009

The Times, UK, May 2, 2009

Charles Graner plans to appeal against his conviction for abusing prisoners

Charles Graner plans to appeal against his conviction for abusing prisoners

Tim Reid in Washington

Prison guards jailed for abusing inmates at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq are planning to appeal against their convictions on the ground that recently released CIA torture memos prove that they were scapegoats for the Bush Administration.

The photographs of prisoner abuse at the Baghdad jail in 2004 sparked worldwide outrage but the previous administration, from President Bush down, blamed the incident on a few low-ranking “bad apples” who were acting on their own.

The decision by President Obama to release the memos showed that the harsh interrogation tactics were approved and authorised at the highest levels of the White House.

Some of the guards who were convicted of abuse want to return to court and argue that the previous administration sanctioned the abuse but withheld its role from their trials.

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The latest reaction to the released memos came as it emerged that the two psychologists hired by the CIA to craft the techniques that were used on terror suspects were paid $1,000 (£673) a day. Neither had carried out nor overseen an interrogation.

Twelve guards at Abu Ghraib were convicted on charges related to the abuse, which included attaching leads to naked prisoners, terrifying them with dogs, beatings and slamming them into walls. The wall-slamming was a technique authorised by Justice Department officials at the time, who also said that the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding was not considered to be torture.

Charles Gittins, a lawyer who represents Charles Graner, the ringleader of the guards who is serving a ten-year sentence, said that the memos proved his long-held contention that Graner and the other defendants, including his former lover Lynndie England, could never have invented tactics such as stress positions and the use of dogs on their own.

“Once the pictures came out, the senior officials involved in the decision-making, they knew. They knew they had to have a cover story. It was the ‘bad apples’ led by Charles Graner,” Mr Gittins told The Washington Post.

Ms England, a poorly educated Army reservist, was pictured holding a dog leash attached to a naked detainee, and also pointing at another being forced to masturbate. She was convicted in September 2005 of abusing prisoners and one count of an indecent act. She was sentenced to three years in a military prison and was paroled after 521 days. Shortly after leaving Iraq she gave birth to a son fathered by Graner. She lives in her home state of West Virginia.

Mr Gittins said the refusal by the Bush Administration to acknowledge that it had authorised such techniques during the trials of the prison guards — and the judges’ refusal to call senior administration officials to testify — undermined their defences.

Mr Gittins wants to take the case of Graner, who is halfway through his sentence, to the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces to argue that top Bush Administration officials kept their complicity from the defence.

Gary Myers, a lawyer who represented Ivan L “Chip” Frederick on the abuse charges, said that he was going to try to use the memos to have his client’s dishonourable discharge removed from his record.

“What we know is that we had at the time a rogue government that created an environment where this sort of conduct was condoned, if not encouraged,” he said.

He added, however, that relying on illegal opinions or orders would probably not be a defence.

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RIGHTS-US: Calls for Torture Inquiry Aren’t Going Away

April 30, 2009

By William Fisher | Inter Press Service

NEW YORK, Apr 29 (IPS) – A coalition of 19 human rights, faith-based and justice organisations is calling on President Barack Obama to investigate torture they charge was sanctioned by the administration of former President George W. Bush.

The group, led by the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), is proposing both a special prosecutor and an “independent, non-partisan commission to examine and report publicly on torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees in the period since September 11, 2001.”

The campaign’s call for accountability comes just days after the release of the Senate Armed Services Committee report on interrogation and torture and the Justice Department legal memos sanctioning torture and inhumane treatment.

Rev. Richard Killmer, executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, told IPS, “NRCAT supports both the establishment of an independent, non-partisan commission of inquiry to investigate the use of torture and a Department of Justice investigation for criminal culpability of those who authorised or carried out acts of torture. Each process is important and can be pursued independently.”

He added, “A commission will help us understand how the illegal interrogation policies came into effect and how they were implemented so that we can ensure that safeguards are in place to prevent future administrations from following the same path.”

“A criminal investigation will send the clear message that government officials cannot violate laws against torture without facing serious criminal sanctions. If we hope to end the practice of torture by agents of the United States once and for all, we must pursue both avenues.”

The coalition proposes a commission, “comparable in stature to the 9/11 commission,” to “look into the facts and circumstances of such abuses, report on lessons learned and recommend measures that would prevent any future abuses.”

The group’s online petition says that a commission is “necessary to reaffirm America’s commitment to the Constitution, international treaty obligations and human rights. The report issued by the commission will strengthen U.S. national security and help to re-establish America’s standing in the world.”

Organisations endorsing the effort include Amnesty International USA, the Constitution Project, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, the Open Society Institute, and Physicians for Human Rights.

NRCAT and its partner organisations say they have “worked together to end U.S.-sponsored torture. During 2008, the religious community advocated for a Presidential Executive Order ending torture. It happened. On January 22, President Obama issued an Executive Order halting torture.”

The coalition says the task now is “to make sure that U.S.-sponsored torture never happens again. To accomplish this goal, our nation needs to put safeguards in place to prevent its recurrence. We will better understand what safeguards are needed if we have a comprehensive understanding of what happened – who was tortured, why they were tortured, and who ordered the torture. As a nation we need the answers to those questions.”

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, the coalition also urges the appointment of a special counsel to investigate criminal acts relating to the confinement and interrogation of detainees since Sep. 11, 2001.

The letter notes that excerpts of a recently released report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) concluded that detainees “had been subjected to torture – a crime under both domestic and international law.”

It says, “The ICRC report, which describes conduct of shocking brutality, shows that a limited investigation is simply insufficient in this case. Government officials, from the lowest CIA officer, to the highest levels of the Executive Branch may be criminally culpable for the use of torture.”

“Because such an investigation will include a review of the conduct of very top officials of the previous administration, and because the appearance of absolute impartiality in determining whether and whom to prosecute is critical to the public’s support and understanding of such prosecutions and the laws at issue, we believe it is both wise and necessary for you to refer this investigation to a Special Counsel.”

NRCAT twice asked former Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint a special counsel to investigate both the destruction of the CIA videotapes that documented the use of “harsh” interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists and whether such techniques violated U.S. and international law.

“While an investigation was initiated into the destruction of the tapes, the investigator, John Durham, was not given the independent status of Special Counsel. Further, Attorney Durham’s investigation was limited to the destruction of the tapes; he apparently does not have the authority to investigate the lawfulness of the interrogation conduct depicted on said tapes,” the group said.

“A full, independent and public investigation into possible violations of U.S. law by high-ranking government officials in the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ is necessary.”

“The American people need to know how detainees have been treated in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere around the world. And they need to know that every measure has been taken to ensure that no violations of U.S. law with respect to torture and ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment’ will be permitted in the future. An independent investigation is a necessary part of achieving this goal,” the group said.

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Truth commission to proceed despite Obama’s wishes

April 29, 2009

By John Byrne  | The Raw Story,
Published: April 28, 2009

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) plans to proceed with a special commission to investigate alleged Bush administration abuses of power, despite lacking President Barack Obama’s support, according to a report Tuesday.

Sen. Leahy called for a “Truth Commission” in February to probe Bush administration policies on torture, interrogation and surveillance and to — as he puts it — “get to the bottom of what went wrong.” Such an idea would be modeled around truth commissions established in South Africa and Chile, which offered immunity to officials who committed abuses in exchange for the truth.

“Many Americans feel we need to get to the bottom of what went wrong,” Leahy said when announcing his idea in February. “I agree. We need to be able to read the page before we turn the page.”

President Obama, meanwhile, has expressed disinterest in investigating the activities of his predecessor, saying it’s time for the country to move on. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), says he doesn’t want the commission to begin until an inquiry headed by Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) examines the Bush administration’s legal defenses of torture techniques.

But Leahy plans to proceed despite lacking the approval of party leaders, sources familiar with the proposal told Politico’s John Bresnahan Tuesday.

“Leahy plans to move ahead with his proposal anyway,” Bresnahan writes. “While he has not found a GOP co-sponsor for legislation creating a truth commission, Leahy is expected to begin circulating a draft soon.”

In a statement, Leahy said his commission will ultimately jibe with the President’s wishes.

“When I first proposed establishing a nonpartisan commission of inquiry in February, I thought then, as I do now, that it was the best approach to conducting a thorough review of national security policies on detention, interrogation and rendition since Sept. 11,” Leahy said in a statement to Bresnahan. “Whether such a comprehensive review happens immediately or in the weeks and months ahead, the evidence that our country committed torture demands a review of the process by which these flawed policies were developed and implemented. President Obama was correct when he said that any review should be done outside of politics. A nonpartisan commission will accomplish just that.”

Speaking in February, Leahy applauded Obama Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision not to rule out prosecutions during his confirmation hearing.

“There are some who resist any effort to investigate the misdeeds of the recent past,” he said. “Indeed, during the nomination hearing of Eric Holder, some of my fellow Senators on the other side of the aisle tried to extract a devil’s bargain from him in exchange for the votes — a commitment that he would not make… That is a pledge no prosecutor should give and Eric Holder did not give it. But because he did not it accounts for some of the votes against him.”

Some liberals have critiqued the proposal, asserting that Bush officials shouldn’t be granted immunity from prosecution even if they’re forthcoming in a congressional investigation. Conservatives have attacked the proposed commission as a political

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Real World Reasons Against Torture

April 26, 2009

By Coleen Rowley | Consortiumnews.com, April 24, 2009

Editor’s Note: Former Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration defenders keep insisting that their “enhanced interrogation techniques” worked and that people would feel differently about these tactics if they only knew the wonderful results.

That, however, is not the view of many professional interrogators who were sickened by the Bush administration’s torture for ethical, legal and practical reasons, as former FBI agent/legal counsel Coleen Rowley notes in this guest essay:

Back in December 2007, when I wrote “Torture is Wrong, Illegal and It Doesn’t Work,” I mentioned that “the FBI agent who reportedly had the best chance of foiling the 9/11 plot, Ali Soufan, the only Arabic-speaking agent in New York and one of only eight in the country, and who has since resigned from the FBI, could and should tell people the truth of how the CIA’s tactics were counterproductive.”

Well guess what?! HE FINALLY DID SO on Thursday!

“My Tortured Decision” is how former FBI Agent Soufan titled his New York Times op-ed, speaking out to specifically refute a number of Dick Cheney’s lies about how torture “worked”. The truth, according to Soufan, is quite the opposite.

Soufan wrote: “There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah [the first al-Qaeda suspect subjected to waterboarding and other harsh tactics] 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.” [For the full op-ed, click here.]

Former Agent Soufan is to be applauded for speaking out after seven years, something even FBI Director Mueller has not really found the courage to do (although Mueller was forced recently to truthfully admit that no attack on America has been disrupted as a result of intelligence obtained through “enhanced techniques”).

I agree with almost everything Soufan writes except his wish that no agency officials at the CIA be prosecuted because almost all of them were “good people who felt as I did about the use of enhanced techniques: it is un-American, ineffective and harmful to our national security.” But he says (implying, whether he realizes it or not, the Nuremberg Defense), they simply had to follow orders.

No disagreement exists on how difficult — literally between a rock and a hard place, any government employee finds him or herself when given illegal and wrongful orders.

When the “green light” was turned on to torture, it was akin to the terrible situation that helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr. found himself in when he looked down from his helicopter to see Lt. William Calley and his men massacring Vietnamese villagers at My Lai. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Death of an American Hero.”]

It was similar to the horrible situation that Daniel Ellsberg found himself in when he realized what was in the Pentagon Papers undercut several presidential administrations’ lies in launching and keeping the Vietnam War going.

There is presently no protection whatsoever for government whistleblowers who find themselves in these situations, especially those who work in intelligence.

As it stands now, if you follow your conscience and speak out internally, you will, at the very least, be retaliated against, possibly fired and at worst, if you speak out publicly as Justice Department Attorney Thomas Tamm did about Bush’s illegal warrantless monitoring, you will subject yourself to criminal prosecution as a “leaker.”

So it’s quite understandable how former Agent Soufan sees the choice as going along with the illegal orders or resigning to avoid personal direct involvement but maintaining silent complicity.

As I wrote in an April 18 letter published in the New York Times: “It’s true, and proved repeatedly in social psychology experiments, that otherwise good people will tend to conform to authority. It’s true that people, under such circumstances, often fail to listen to their consciences. But don’t conflate this obedience factor with not being able to appreciate the wrongfulness.”

On my own personal note, the final thing I did the day I retired from the FBI (in December, 2004) was e-mail my last mini-legal lecture to every employee in the entire Minneapolis FBI office warning my former colleagues how the “green light” would inevitably go out, and when that happens, it always leaves the little guys holding the bag.

Nearly all the little guys in government knew, by that time, about the green-but-evil light that had been turned on. And even though the FBI was not going along with the torture tactics, it was going overboard in other areas involving massive data collection on American citizens.

Because I was already persona non grata in the FBI for having spoken out about wrongful over-reactions and counterproductive responses after 9-11, I would only catch others’ hushed whispers about the “green light” stuff, but I think nearly everyone was well aware.

That last warning was the least I could do as I walked out the door but in all probability, many who got my goodbye e-mail immediately deleted it as they dreaded any reminder about “green lights” that always go out.

In the criminal justice system, the mitigating circumstances of such difficult, untenable situations and choices of subordinate government employees are not irrelevant and would be evaluated.

In the course of criminal investigation, it’s common to give immunity to underlings who, it is found, had little or no choice but to follow orders and are therefore not as culpable as those in power giving the orders.

Additionally, once the truth of the facts is ascertained, there’s room for all kinds of humanitarian arguments as to what, if any, are proper “punishments.” With respect to those on the receiving end of illegal orders, I’d volunteer to help explain how absolutely difficult their situation is.

I’d even help the defense find a social psychologist or two who can demonstrate what all the experiments on “group think” and “obedience to authority” have proven with regard to human behavior.

But this would go to evaluating relative responsibility and mitigating punishments and should not be used as a reason to jump over the most crucial first phase of the criminal justice process: the fact-finding ascertainment of truth.

We’ve already heard enough from fictional characters like Jack Bauer. It’s time to hear from real agents who operated in the real world like Ali Soufan.

After we hear the facts, then let’s also hear the mitigating circumstances of how difficult, how very difficult it is not to follow a President’s orders in the real world.

Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for almost 24 years, was legal counsel to the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003.  She came to national attention in June 2002, when she testified before Congress about serious lapses before 9/11 that helped account for the failure to prevent the attacks.  She now writes and speaks on ethical decision-making and on balancing civil liberties with the need for effective investigation.

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RIGHTS-US: Senate Report Casts Grim Light on Bush Era

April 24, 2009

By William Fisher | Inter Press Service News

NEW YORK, Apr 22 (IPS) – Pentagon interrogators continuously ramped up their abusive techniques against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq and Afghanistan in a vain attempt to establish a link between the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. on Sep. 11, 2001.

This is among the principal conclusions of a long-awaited report released Tuesday by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

The report also concluded that health professionals played a key role in helping the U.S. Defence Department to introduce waterboarding and other illegal interrogation techniques months before these practices were “justified” by Justice Department lawyers and approved by their superiors in the administration of former President George W. Bush.

The report says that the Defence Department was using harsh interrogation techniques long before they were “justified” by Justice Department lawyers and approved by their Bush administration superiors.

The report quotes a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist as saying that the Bush administration put “relentless pressure” on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence an al Qaeda-Hussein link.

This kind of information would have provided a foundation for one of Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003, the report says. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Hussein’s regime.

The report says that senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, were all aware of the development and use of the abusive interrogation techniques.

Despite warnings from military personnel that the use of these techniques on Guantanamo detainees could backfire, 15 specific techniques were sanctioned by Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002, the report said.

What followed was “an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely”, it said.

The report said, “That these techniques had been endorsed became known by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, setting the stage for the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.”

The report also notes that the use of brutal interrogation techniques started in early 2002, up to eight months before Justice Department lawyers approved the use of waterboarding and nine other harsh methods, Senate investigators found.

Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin, the committee chairman, said, “The report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse – such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan – to low-ranking soldiers.”

Claims that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorised acts of a “few bad apples” were simply false, he said.

“A few bad apples” is how Rumsfeld described the low-level soldiers shown in photos around the world abusing detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Several of these military personnel were convicted and sentenced to prison terms, but a series of Pentagon investigations found no evidence that prisoner abuse was a policy that came from the Pentagon’s civilian leadership.

“The paper trail on abuse leads to top civilian leaders, and our report connects the dots.” He said it shows a paper trail going from Rumsfeld’s authorisation of abusive interrogation techniques “to Guantánamo to Afghanistan and to Iraq.”

Human rights advocates hailed the Levin report. Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said, “Once again, we are presented with clear-cut evidence that the Bush administration’s highest ranking officials were not only complicit in the use of torture, but were actively engaged in its implementation. It is now time to act on this evidence.”

The report also documents how a secretive military training programme called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) became the foundation of the interrogations by both the Pentagon and the CIA.

SERE was developed many years ago as a way to give U.S. military personnel some sense of the treatment they might face if they were captured by China, the Soviet Union or other Cold War adversaries.

The committee’s report notes that the CIA also drew on the SERE programme for harsh methods it used in secret overseas jails for Qaeda suspects. The CIA has said it used waterboarding, a method of near-drowning used in the SERE programme, on three captured terrorism suspects in 2002 and 2003.

Cheney and others who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions, and waterboarding insist they were legal. On Tuesday, Cheney asked the Justice Department to declassify and release documents he says will show that these techniques produced valuable intelligence.

Media accounts also report that a secretive government contractor played a key role in developing the Bush administration’s interrogation methods. The company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, is named after the two military psychologists who founded it, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Beginning in 2002, they trained interrogators in brutal techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and pain. The psychologists, based near Spokane in the state of Washington, reportedly “reverse-engineered” the tactics taught in SERE training for use on prisoners held by the U.S.

The declassified torture memos released last week reportedly relied heavily on their advice. In one memo, Justice Department attorney Jay Bybee wrote, “Based on your research into the use of these methods at the SERE school and consultation with others with expertise in the field of psychology and interrogation, you do not anticipate that any prolonged harm would result from the use of the waterboard.”

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a not for profit advocacy group, is calling for the psychologists who justified, designed, and implemented torture for the CIA and Department of Defense to” lose their professional licenses and to face criminal prosecution.”

“Long before Justice Department lawyers were tasked to justify torture, U.S. psychologists were busy actually perpetrating it,” said Steven Reisner, PhD, advisor on psychological ethics at PHR. “These individuals must not only face prosecution for breaking the law, they must lose their licenses for shaming their profession’s ethics.”

He told IPS, “The conclusion that these interrogation techniques cause no lasting harm is the equivalent of psychological malpractice.” He said the proponents of these techniques “cherry-picked the research to reach a foregone conclusion. How can you compare U.S. soldiers who volunteered for SERE training, and could have stopped their interrogations at any time, with the effects on a prisoner who has been ‘disappeared’, is in fear for his life, and believes he will never see his family again?”

He added that the CIA’s own research into the effects of SERE training showed that it produced “extreme and lasting effects to the point of psychosis.”

In October 2008, the American Psychological Association approved a landmark measure banning members from taking part in interrogations of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan and all of the secret CIA black sites. The American Medical Association has passed a similar measure.

The Armed Services Committee report was released amid growing calls for an independent inquiry into abusive interrogation techniques and the people responsible for them. Proposals range from a “truth commission” to the appointment of an independent prosecutor by the Obama Justice Department.

President Obama has consistently said he is more inclined to look forward rather than backward. Earlier this week, he visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and told agency employees there would be no prosecutions of operatives who carried out the abusive interrogation techniques because they believed they were acting in accordance with legal rulings from the Justice Department.

But a day later, he said he would not oppose either an independent commission investigation or appointment of a special prosecutor. He left these decisions to Congress and to the Attorney General, Eric Holder.

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Four CIA chiefs said ‘don’t reveal torture memos’

April 20, 2009

Agency’s ex-directors objected to interrogation techniques being revealed. But Barack Obama went ahead anyway.

By Pamela Hess | The Independent, UK, April 19, 2009

Former CIA directors General Michael Hayden (above), Porter Goss, George Tenet and John Deutch fought the White House over release of embarrassing documents

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Former CIA directors General Michael Hayden (above), Porter Goss, George Tenet and John Deutch fought the White House over release of embarrassing documents

Four former CIA directors opposed the release of classified Bush-era interrogation memos, officials say, describing objections that went all the way to the White House and slowed disclosure of the records. Former CIA chiefs Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, George Tenet and John Deutch all called the White House in March warning that release of the so-called “torture memos” would compromise intelligence operations, current and former officials say.

President Barack Obama ultimately overruled the objections after internal discussions that intensified in the weeks that followed the former directors’ intervention. The memos were released on Thursday.

Mr Obama’s involvement grew as the decision neared, and he even led a National Security Council session on the matter, four senior administration officials said. White House adviser David Axelrod, who said he also talked to Mr Obama about the pending release of the memos in recent weeks, said the ex-directors’ opposition was considered seriously but did not impede the decision-making process. “The CIA directors weighed in and it slowed things down,” Mr Axelrod said on Friday.

Related articles

The memos detailed the legal rationales that senior Bush administration lawyers drew up authorising the CIA to use simulated drowning and other harsh techniques on terror suspects. They described how prisoners were naked, shackled and hooded at the start of interrogation sessions. When the CIA interrogator removed the hood, the questioning began. When a prisoner resisted, the documents outlined techniques the CIA could use to bring him back in line:

* Nudity, sleep deprivation and dietary restrictions kept prisoners compliant and reminded them they had no control over their basic needs. Clothes and food could be used as rewards for co-operation.

* Slapping prisoners on the face or abdomen was allowed. So was grabbing them forcefully by the collar or slamming them into a false wall, a technique called “walling” intended to induce fear rather than pain.

* Water hoses were used to douse the prisoners for minutes at a time. The hoses were turned on and off as the interrogation continued.

* Prisoners were put into one of three “stress positions”, such as sitting on the floor with legs out straight and arms raised in the air.

* At night, the detainees were shackled, standing naked or wearing a nappy. The length of sleep deprivation varied but was authorised for up to 180 hours, or seven and a half days. Interrogation sessions ranged from 30 minutes to several hours and could be repeated as necessary, and as approved by psychological and medical teams.

The Bush administration approved the use of waterboarding, a technique in which a suspect was strapped to a board, his feet raised above his head, and his face covered with a wet cloth as interrogators poured water over it. The body responds as if it is drowning, over and over as the process is repeated. “We find that the use of the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death,” Justice Department attorneys wrote. “From the vantage point of any reasonable person undergoing this procedure in such circumstances, he would feel as if he is drowning at the very moment of the procedure due to the uncontrollable physiological sensation he is experiencing.”

But attorneys decided that waterboarding caused “no pain or actual harm whatsoever” and so did not meet the “severe pain and suffering” standard to be considered torture.

President Obama has ended the CIA’s interrogation programme. CIA interrogators are now required to follow army guidelines, under which waterboarding and many of the techniques listed above are prohibited.

The President gave the question of these documents’ release “the appropriate reflection”, Mr Axelrod said. He said Mr Obama’s deliberations revolved around “the issue of national security versus the rule of law”, and amounted to “one of the most profound issues the President of the United States has to deal with”.

On 18 March, the Justice Department told the Director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, as he was leaving for a foreign trip, that it would be recommending that the White House release the memos almost completely uncensored, officials said. Mr Panetta told the US Attorney General, Eric Holder, and officials in the White House that the administration needed to discuss the possibility that the memos’ release might expose CIA officers to lawsuits on allegations of torture and abuse. Mr Panetta also pushed for more censorship of the memos, officials said. The Justice Department informed other senior CIA leaders of the decision to release the memos and, as a courtesy, told former agency directors.

Senior CIA officials objected, arguing that the release would damage the agency’s ability to interrogate prisoners. They also said the move would tarnish CIA officers who had acted on the Bush officials’ legal guidance. And they warned that the action would erode foreign intelligence services’ trust in the CIA’s ability to protect national security secrets. The four former directors immediately protested to the White House, officials said. The enhanced interrogation procedures outlined in the memos had been approved on Mr Tenet’s watch during the Bush administration.

On 19 March, the Justice Department requested a two-week delay in responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) that asked for release of the memos. Justice officials told the court dealing with that lawsuit that it was considering releasing the memos voluntarily. Two weeks later, Justice Department lawyers told the court the memos would come out on or before 16 April.

Inside the White House, according to aides, Mr Obama expressed concerns that releasing the memos could threaten current intelligence operations as well as US officials. He also echoed the CIA chiefs’ worries about US relationships with always-skittish foreign intelligence services. The Justice Department argued that the ACLU lawsuit would in the end force the administration to release the documents anyway, officials said.

Mr Obama eventually agreed. The administration decided it would be better to make the release voluntarily, so as not to be seen as being forced to do so, the officials said. The only items blacked out included names of US employees or foreign services or items related to techniques still in use. Still, CIA officials needed reassurance about the decision, the officials said.

Mr Obama took the unusual step of accompanying his decision with a personal letter to CIA employees. He also devoted a big share of his public statement to saying and repeating that he believed strongly in keeping intelligence operations secret, and operations about them classified. He said he would not apologise for doing so in the future

What the memos reveal

The Bush administration memos describe the interrogation methods used against 28 terror suspects, the fullest government account of the techniques to date. They range from waterboarding – or simulated drowning – to using a plastic neck collar to slam detainees into walls. The treatment of two suspects in particular are described:

Abu Zubaydah In 2002, the Justice Department authorised CIA interrogators to step up the pressure even further on the suspected terrorist. Justice Department lawyers said the CIA could place Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box. Because Zubaydah appeared afraid of insects, they also authorised interrogators to place him in a box filled with caterpillars (though the tactic was not in fact used). Finally, the Justice Department authorised interrogators to take a step into what the United States now considers torture: waterboarding. Zubaydah was strapped to a board, his feet raised above his head. His face was covered with a wet cloth as interrogators poured water over it.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed A memo dated 30 May 2005 says that before the harsher methods were used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a top al-Qa’ida detainee, he refused to answer questions about pending plots against the US. “Soon, you will know,” he said, according to the memo. It says the interrogations later extracted details of a plot called the “second wave”, using East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner in Los Angeles. Plots that were disrupted, the memos say, include the alleged effort by Jose Padilla to detonate a “dirty bomb”, spreading radioactive materials by means of explosives.

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Torture: Holding America to account

April 18, 2009

To read the four newly released Bush-era memos on America’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” for terror suspects is to enter a very dark moral world indeed. It is the Orwellian world of the concealed global detention network set up by the CIA on President Bush’s authority after 9/11 in which suspected terrorists – many of whom may have had a lot of blood on their hands – were secretly held in US bases from Afghanistan to Romania and systematically tortured. A world in which Britain is implicated too, do not forget.

The memos do not admit torture, of course. The United States, Mr Bush famously claimed in 2006, “does not torture”. The memos embody a cynical bureaucratic attempt to align what went on in the secret prisons with that claim. Yet no one who reads their argument that the threat of imminent drowning caused by waterboarding does not reach the level of “prolonged mental harm” which the Bush lawyers argue is necessary to constitute torture, can doubt that torture is precisely what the CIA had been permitted and encouraged to carry out. The truth, as the new US attorney general Eric Holder has said, is clear: “Waterboarding is torture.”

Jaw-dropping though they are, the memos are not the only evidence of the Bush administration’s embrace of torture. Two years ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was given access to 14 Guantánamo detainees who had been through the “alternative procedures”. Their experiences, retold in two recent essays by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books (one of which we republish inside our own Review today), tell of the relentless abuse of detainees who were kept naked in low temperatures for weeks, forced to live in permanent bright light (or total darkness), required to wear nappies, deprived of solid food, blindfolded, shackled, forcibly shaved, and compelled to wear earphones through which loud music was repeatedly played.

The “procedures” discussed in the memos – grasping, slapping, holding, banging against walls, confinement in boxes (sometimes with insects), sleep deprivation, prolonged confinement in “stress positions” and waterboarding – were additional to these. The ICRC heard accounts of most of them from the detainees. These accounts are far more graphic (and even credible) than the cold lawyerish prose of the memos. The ICRC conclusion was emphatic: “The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA programme, either singly or in combination, constituted torture.”

America should hang its head at methods that Dick Cheney still defends (and which, importantly, may not have yielded much good intelligence). Barack Obama did the right thing by ending the abuses within hours of taking office. He did well to publish the legal memos too. In such ways Mr Obama makes clear that his administration is making a clean break with the discredited past, while at the same time graphically reminding the world why that past (and Britain’s role in it) was so disgraceful.

On balance Mr Obama may also be right to assure CIA personnel that they will not face prosecution if they carried out their work in good faith based on the old legal advice. But an essential part of the rule of law is that those who break it must be answerable for their actions. The Bush administration crossed a fateful threshold after 9/11. Its officials, including its lawyers, must be accountable for that. It is understandable that Mr Obama does not want his first term to be dominated by a reliving of the past. Yet America will only ensure it does not embrace torture again by getting to the bottom of why it did so this time. A full congressional inquiry is in order, as Speaker Pelosi has hinted. One way or another, those who ordered the abuses, from the president and vice-president down, must answer for them.

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How Bush’s Tortured Legal Logic Won

April 17, 2009

Robert Parry | Consortiumnews.com, April 17, 2009

Almost as disturbing as reading the Bush administration’s approved menu of brutal interrogation techniques is recognizing how President George W. Bush successfully shopped for government attorneys willing to render American laws meaningless by turning words inside out.

The four “torture” memos, released Thursday, revealed not just that the stomach-turning reports about CIA interrogators abusing “war on terror” suspects were true, but that the United States had gone from a “nation of laws” to a “nation of legal sophistry” – where conclusions on law are politically preordained and the legal analysis is made to fit.

You have passages like this in the May 10, 2005, memo by Steven Bradbury, then acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel:

“Another question is whether the requirement of ‘prolonged mental harm’ caused by or resulting from one of the enumerated predicate acts is a separate requirement, or whether such ‘prolonged mental harm’ is to be presumed any time one of the predicate acts occurs.”

As each phrase in the Convention Against Torture was held up to such narrow examination, the forest of criminal torture was lost in the trees of arcane legal jargon. Collectively, the memos leave a disorienting sense that any ambiguity in words can be twisted to justify almost anything.

So, a “war on terror” prisoner could not only be locked up in solitary confinement indefinitely based on the sole authority of President Bush but could be subjected to a battery of abusive and humiliating tactics, all in the name of extracting some information that purportedly would help keep the United States safe – and it would not be called “torture.”

Some tactics were bizarre, like feeding detainees a liquid diet of Ensure to make “other techniques, such as sleep deprivation, more effective.” The memo’s sleep deprivation clause, in turn, allowed interrogators to shackle prisoners to an overhead pipe (or in some other uncomfortable position) for up to 180 hours (or seven-and-a-half days).

While shackled, the prisoner would be dressed in a diaper that “is checked regularly and changed as necessary.” The memo asserted that “the use of the diaper is for sanitary and health purposes of the detainee; it is not used for the purpose of humiliating the detainee, and it is not considered to be an interrogation technique.”

Beyond the painful disorientation from depriving a person of sleep while chained in a standing position for days, the Justice Department memos called for prisoners to be forced into other “stress positions” for varying periods of time to cause “the physical discomfort associated with muscle fatigue.”

Tiny Boxes

The detainees also could be put into small, dark boxes where they could barely move (and in the case of one detainee, Abu Zubaydah, could have an insect slipped into his box as a way of playing on his fear of bugs), according to the Aug. 1, 2002, memo.

“The duration of confinement varies based upon the size of the container,” the May 10, 2005, memo added, with the smaller space (sitting only) restricted to two hours at a time and a somewhat larger box (permitting standing) limited to eight hours at a time and 18 hours a day.

Then, there were various slaps, grabs and slamming a prisoner against a “flexible” wall while his neck was in a sling “to help prevent whiplash.”

Prisoners also were subjected to forced nudity, sometimes in the presence of women, according to the May 10 memo.

“We understand that interrogators are trained to avoid sexual innuendo or any acts of implicit or explicit sexual degradation,” the memo said. “Nevertheless, interrogators can exploit the detainee’s fear of being seen naked.

“In addition, female officers involved in the interrogation process may see the detainees naked; and for purposes of our analysis, we will assume that detainees subjected to nudity as an interrogation technique are aware that they may be seen naked by females.”

Another approved technique was “water dousing” in which a detainee is sprayed with water that can be as cold as 41 degrees Fahrenheit for up to 20 minutes. Slightly warmer water could be used to douse a prisoner for longer periods of time.

Both the 2002 and 2005 memos permitted the “waterboard,” a technique that involves covering a prisoner’s face with a cloth and pouring water on it to create the panicked sensation of drowning. The interrogators also were authorized to prevent a detainee from trying to “defeat the technique” by thrashing about or trying to breathe from the corner of his mouth.

“The interrogator may cup his hands around the detainee’s nose and mouth to dam the runoff, in which case it would not be possible for the detainee to breathe during the application of the water,” the May 10 memo reads. “In addition, you have informed us that the technique may be applied in a manner to defeat efforts by the detainee to hold his breath by, for example, beginning an application of water as the detainee is exhaling.”

At least since the days of the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding has been regarded as torture. The U.S. government prosecuted Japanese soldiers who used it against American troops in World War II. But the legal reasoning of the Bush administration’s memos transformed waterboarding into an acceptable method of interrogation.

Lawyer-Shopping

Although the four released memos included the most famous one – from Aug. 1, 2002, which provided the initial legal cover for abusive interrogations – the three others from May 2005 may be more significant in destroying the legal cover that President Bush and his senior aides have hidden behind.

Their claim has been that they were simply operating within legal parameters set by lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is responsible for advising Presidents on the limits of their authority. In other words, professional lawyers provided objective legal advice and the administration simply followed it.

But that claim now collides with the reality that other Justice Department lawyers – from 2003 to 2005 – overturned the initial memo and resisted its reimplementation until they were ousted. In effect, the Bush administration appears to have gone lawyer-shopping for attorneys who would craft opinions that the White House wanted.

Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee signed the original Aug. 1, 2002, “torture” memo and other opinions granting expansive presidential powers (drafted by his deputy John Yoo).

However, Bybee quit in 2003 to accept President Bush’s appointment of him as a federal appeals court judge in San Francisco, and his successor as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, withdrew many Bybee-Yoo memos as legally flawed.

Goldsmith’s actions angered the White House, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington. In a 2007 book, The Terror Presidency, Goldsmith described one White House meeting at which Addington pulled out a 3-by-5-inch card listing the OLC opinions that Goldsmith had withdrawn.

“Since you’ve withdrawn so many legal opinions that the President and others have been relying on,” Addington said sarcastically, “we need you to go through all of OLC’s opinions and let us know which ones you will stand by.”

Though supported by Deputy Attorney General James Comey, Goldsmith succumbed to the White House pressure and quit in 2004. Still, despite Goldsmith’s departure, Comey and the new acting head of the OLC, Daniel Levin, resisted restoring the administration’s right to use the harsh interrogation techniques.

That didn’t occur until White House counsel Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General in 2005 and made Bradbury the acting chief of the OLC. After signing the three “torture” memos in May, Bradbury was rewarded with Bush’s formal nomination in June to be Assistant Attorney General for the OLC (although he never gained Senate confirmation).

Comey Departs

With the OLC reaffirming the administration’s interrogation techniques, Comey’s days were numbered.

Though having been a successful prosecutor on past terrorism cases, such as the Khobar Towers bombing which killed 19 U.S. servicemen in 1996, Comey had earned the derisive nickname from Bush as “Cuomey” or just “Cuomo,” a strong insult from Republicans who deemed former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo to be excessively liberal and famously indecisive.

On Aug. 15, 2005, in his farewell speech, Comey urged his colleagues to defend the integrity and honesty of the Justice Department.

“I expect that you will appreciate and protect an amazing gift you have received as an employee of the Department of Justice,” Comey said. “It is a gift you may not notice until the first time you stand up and identify yourself as an employee of the Department of Justice and say something – whether in a courtroom, a conference room or a cocktail party – and find that total strangers believe what you say next.

“That gift – the gift that makes possible so much of the good we accomplish – is a reservoir of trust and credibility, a reservoir built for us, and filled for us, by those who went before – most of whom we never knew. They were people who made sacrifices and kept promises to build that reservoir of trust.

“Our obligation – as the recipients of that great gift – is to protect that reservoir, to pass it to those who follow, those who may never know us, as full as we got it. The problem with reservoirs is that it takes tremendous time and effort to fill them, but one hole in a dam can drain them.

“The protection of that reservoir requires vigilance, an unerring commitment to truth, and a recognition that the actions of one may affect the priceless gift that benefits all. I have tried my absolute best – in matters big and small – to protect that reservoir and inspire others to protect it.”

Though the full import of Comey’s comments was not apparent at the time, it now appears that he was referring to the legal gamesmanship that Bradbury and others had used to circumvent American laws and traditions to enable the Bush administration to engage in torture.

In releasing the four memos on Thursday, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder repeated their rejection of the Bybee-Yoo-Bradbury legal theories, but also stipulated that they would oppose any legal action against the CIA interrogators who abused detainees under the Bush administration’s legal guidance.

Neither Obama nor Holder spoke specifically about possible legal accountability for Bush’s compliant lawyers — or for Bush and his top aides who oversaw the torture policies and picked the lawyers. However, Obama recommended a focus on the future, not the past.

Calling the period covered by the four memos a “dark and painful chapter in our history,” Obama added that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

The lack of accountability for Bush and his lawyers, however, may mean that future Presidents will follow Bush’s lead and assign some clever legal wordsmiths the job of finding ways around criminal statutes, international treaties and the U.S. Constitution.

If legal language can be interpreted any way that a President wishes – and if the U.S. Supreme Court is stocked with like-minded judges – then laws will no longer protect anyone, whether a suspected Middle Eastern terrorist or an American citizen.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

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