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Reagan’s DOJ Prosecuted Texas Sheriff For Waterboarding Prisoners
by Jason Leopold, April 27, 2009 – 8:49am
George W. Bush’s Justice Department said subjecting a person to the near drowning of waterboarding was not a crime and didn’t even cause pain, but Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department thought otherwise, prosecuting a Texas sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.
Federal prosecutors secured a 10-year sentence against the sheriff and four years in prison for the deputies. But that 1983 case – which would seem to be directly on point for a legal analysis on waterboarding two decades later – was never mentioned in the four Bush administration opinions released last week.
The failure to cite the earlier waterboarding case and a half-dozen other precedents that dealt with torture is reportedly one of the critical findings of a Justice Department watchdog report that legal sources say faults former Bush administration lawyers – Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury – for violating “professional standards.”
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Enough 11 dimensional chess moves, eh?
…fascinating. Why can’t Leopold change his name so when I read a good article by him I am not wondering if he’s lying to me?
If true, stunning.
these were evil terrists, monsters with death rays coming from their eyes. It is OK to torture monsters, isn’t it?
Keep gettin’ next to our sweet little mama!
but it bears repeating. From the looks of the information that is coming out, it is obvious that Bybee, Yoo, and Bradbury used improper methodology. That the euphemism for saying they cherry picked their evidence.
If these three (and whoever else was involved) wanted to make an honest argument, they would have looked at all of the evidence and come to a conclusion. This article and the Texas case proves that waterboarding is 1) torture and 2) a prosecutable offense. Had these people looked at of the evidence, they should have concluded that waterboarding is not acceptable.
Instead, they started with the conclusion that waterboarding is perfectly fine and sought out evidence to make their case. This point is not up for discussion. There is no evidence in the memos that they did consider alternate views.
The next question is whether these three were the ones who decided to start with the conclusion and reason their way backwards or did Cheney, et al direct them to do this.
In any event, these three could have said, “this is wrong; I fucking quit.” They did not and are therefore culpable.
driving distance of the “People’s Republic of Cambridge Massachusetts yet right wing radio station WTKK appears to be a formidable force catering to the younger working class demographic. They are never,ever going to give up that retarded bogus gigantic ocean sized cesspool that is the official story of 911 and it’s ugly cousin the War of Error. 911 has become the Mt Everest of American grassy knolls and the rest of the world knows it and has moved on.
Ya I support prosecutions for torture but know also that such focus does/will/and has been think tank studied to be a loose loose situation for the peasants not in control of the levers of the New World Order parasites.
I would much rather people live in total that fuck you our own government killed 3000 of our own people and then covered it up so your corporate selling me anything otherwise tells me your corporate assholes are aligned with Satan himself and I ain’t buying. Now that would be activism.
debating the legal definitions of what is torture and what is the law, are managing to throughly chew up centuries of progress and human rights. The Laws are self evident, especially in war crimes and human rights abuses but our government just makes a political tangle out of what is wrong and violates all laws, ours and the worlds. The letter of the law takes on new meanings when our own government reduces it to politics and semantics.
If TX the epicenter of our cultural barbarianism found this to be torture and illegal why are we even having this ‘debate’. Seems we have reached the bottom of the slippery slope and are now in the muck. Were told that the swamp has been drained and we just need to look forward, and ignore the muck that’s not going anywhere until someone actually admits it’s muck and cleans it up.
This did not happen without ‘softening’ up the people as regards to torture by catapulting the propaganda. To leave the illegal and depraved symptoms of our insane secret police and the neo cons in place and call it policy or necessary makes us all complict. Maybe we are if we suck it up, call it political and play the pols game. What have we won but our own shame, and the destruction of a democratic Republic.