Pleasingly, responsibility, or at least the ok for, waterboarding torture is reaching up into the upper echelons of the Bush White House.
CNN reports that a Senate finding implicates both Condi Rice and VP Cheney:
"Top Bush administration officials gave the CIA approval to use waterboarding, a controversial interrogation technique, as early as 2002, a Senate intelligence report shows.
On July 17, 2002, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who later became secretary of state, said the CIA could proceed with "alternative interrogation methods," including waterboarding, when questioning suspected al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah.
The decision was contingent on the Justice Department's determining the method's legality. A week later, Attorney General John Ashcroft had determined the "proposed interrogation techniques were lawful," the report said."
Meanwhile, Obama, rightly, faces increasing pressure to pursue the torturers. Just one small example is well known Amy Goodman in her piece "Torturers Should be Punished" writing in truthdig.com:
"For years, people have felt they have been hitting their heads against walls (some suffered this literally, as the memos detail). On Election Day, it looked like that wall had become a door. But that door is open only a crack. Whether it is kicked open or slammed shut is not up to the president. Though he may occupy the most powerful office on Earth, there is a force more powerful: committed people demanding change. We need a universal standard of justice. Torturers should be punished."
See also Eugene Robinson - the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Prize for commentary - in "Torture Is a Crime, and Crimes Demand Prosecution" also on truthdig.com
"The many roads of inquiry into the Bush administration’s abusive “interrogation techniques” all lead to one stubborn, inconvenient fact: Torture is not just immoral, but also illegal. This means that once we learn the whole truth, the law will oblige us to act on it.
Understandably, the Obama administration wants to avoid getting bogged down in a long, wrenching legal drama that almost certainly would be partisan and divisive. But I’m not sure it’s possible to skirt the criminal implications of what we already know, let alone what we might find out in a full-scale “truth commission” investigation with access to all relevant witnesses and documents.
On the moral question, the administration has been straightforward and righteous. One of President Obama’s first acts was to declare that the United States will no longer practice waterboarding or other abusive interrogation methods, saying that such depredations are inimical to our nation’s values and traditions. Attorney General Eric Holder stated at his confirmation hearings that “waterboarding is torture.” This refreshing and admirable clarity stands in stark contrast to the fog of legalistic sophistry in which the Bush administration cloaked its secret prisons.
On the legal question, though, the Obama team has been far less definitive. This is what Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, told his staff about the interrogation abuses in a memo last week: “I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past, but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”
CNN reports that a Senate finding implicates both Condi Rice and VP Cheney:
"Top Bush administration officials gave the CIA approval to use waterboarding, a controversial interrogation technique, as early as 2002, a Senate intelligence report shows.
On July 17, 2002, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who later became secretary of state, said the CIA could proceed with "alternative interrogation methods," including waterboarding, when questioning suspected al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah.
The decision was contingent on the Justice Department's determining the method's legality. A week later, Attorney General John Ashcroft had determined the "proposed interrogation techniques were lawful," the report said."
Meanwhile, Obama, rightly, faces increasing pressure to pursue the torturers. Just one small example is well known Amy Goodman in her piece "Torturers Should be Punished" writing in truthdig.com:
"For years, people have felt they have been hitting their heads against walls (some suffered this literally, as the memos detail). On Election Day, it looked like that wall had become a door. But that door is open only a crack. Whether it is kicked open or slammed shut is not up to the president. Though he may occupy the most powerful office on Earth, there is a force more powerful: committed people demanding change. We need a universal standard of justice. Torturers should be punished."
See also Eugene Robinson - the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Prize for commentary - in "Torture Is a Crime, and Crimes Demand Prosecution" also on truthdig.com
"The many roads of inquiry into the Bush administration’s abusive “interrogation techniques” all lead to one stubborn, inconvenient fact: Torture is not just immoral, but also illegal. This means that once we learn the whole truth, the law will oblige us to act on it.
Understandably, the Obama administration wants to avoid getting bogged down in a long, wrenching legal drama that almost certainly would be partisan and divisive. But I’m not sure it’s possible to skirt the criminal implications of what we already know, let alone what we might find out in a full-scale “truth commission” investigation with access to all relevant witnesses and documents.
On the moral question, the administration has been straightforward and righteous. One of President Obama’s first acts was to declare that the United States will no longer practice waterboarding or other abusive interrogation methods, saying that such depredations are inimical to our nation’s values and traditions. Attorney General Eric Holder stated at his confirmation hearings that “waterboarding is torture.” This refreshing and admirable clarity stands in stark contrast to the fog of legalistic sophistry in which the Bush administration cloaked its secret prisons.
On the legal question, though, the Obama team has been far less definitive. This is what Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, told his staff about the interrogation abuses in a memo last week: “I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past, but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”
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