( – promoted by buhdydharma )
Their arguments have always been, and continue to be especially from their propaganda machines, TV and Radio, that what they did was cleared by the administrative lawyers, as I heard one say this morning “Highly experienced Lawyers!”, and they were are then legal!
The George Washington University National Security Archives have posted up the reports, side by side, from the Bush administration, in May 2008, and the newly released same report from the Obama administration, August 24th 2009.
Posted – August 25, 2009
Posted below is a side-by-side comparison of the Bush and Obama administration versions of the 2004 CIA Inspector General Report on Torture…………..To View Visit Here
So if this was all legal, and they were comfortable to carryout these practices, In This Countries Name, what were they hiding when they redacted so much in their release of!
From the University E-Report sent on 8.25.09:
Washington, DC, August 25, 2009 – Today, the National Security Archive posted a side-by-side comparison of two very different versions of a 2004 report on the CIA’s “Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities” by Agency Inspector General John Helgerson. Yesterday, the Obama administration released new portions of the report including considerably more information about the use of torture and other illegal practices by CIA interrogators than a version of the report declassified by the Bush administration in 2008.
New revelations include:
* Details on “specific unauthorized or undocumented torture techniques,” including the use of guns, drills, threats, smoke, extreme cold, stress positions, “stiff brush and shackles,” waterboarding, mock executions and “hard takedown.”
* A look at the legal reasoning behind the Agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and the development of Agency guidance on capture, detention and interrogation.
* A brief discussion of the history of the CIA interrogation program, including the “resurgence of interest in teaching interrogation techniques” in the early 1980s “as one of several methods to foster foreign liaison relationships.”
* The conclusion that, while CIA interrogations had produced useful intelligence, the “effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained” is not “so easily measured.”
The National Security Archive also announced today the publication of the Torture Archive — more than 83,000 pages of primary source documents (and thousands more to come) related to the detention and interrogation of individuals by the United States, in connection with the conduct of hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the broader context of the “global war on terror.” The goal of the Torture Archive is to become the online institutional memory for essential evidence on torture in U.S. policy. {JS: my hightlighting}
With support from the Open Society Institute and the JEHT Foundation since 2006, this initial launch of the Torture Archive includes the complete set of declassified Combatant Status Review Tribunal and Administrative Review Board files from the Pentagon, and thousands of documents resulting from FOIA litigation brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Archive and other plaintiffs. The Torture Archive will continue to add documents as they are released through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation or Executive discretion.
There’s a wealth of information right at the finger tips, with backlinks and your own ability to take it even further.
3 comments
This will be a fine resource!
every smack dab of the report, except, perhaps, “water torture” admitted to by both Bush and Cheney.
Noting The Torture Archive, I’m wondering at whose behest this effort was commenced. Well, whoever, we can only be thankful to those initiators and the ensuing documentation.
Thank you for this, jimstarro!