Feb 21 2010

Rahm Emanuel’s DoJ skull-fucks torture victims.

“Emanuel worried that such investigations would alienate the intelligence community…,” Mayer reported. “Emanuel couldn’t complain directly to Holder without violating strictures against political interference in prosecutorial decisions. But he conveyed his unhappiness to Holder indirectly, two sources said. Emanuel demanded, ‘Didn’t he get the memo that we’re not re-litigating the past?'”

“Bring me their skulls!” thundered the Office of Professional Responsibility.  “We have stripped from them all human dignity and autonomy, we have branded them with an absolute sense of self-alienating vulnerability to the agonizing sovereignty of their inscrutable, perverted, and god-like tormentors, we have blocked all avenues of justice, we have forever sealed their grievances in their tormented souls, and now we must fuck their skulls.”

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    • TMC on February 21, 2010 at 04:10
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    Yoo Said Bush Could Order Civilians ‘Massacred’

    The report, more than four years in the making, is filled with new details into how a small group of lawyers at the Justice Department, the CIA, and the White House crafted the legal arguments that gave the green light to some of the most controversial tactics in the Bush administration’s war on terror. They also describe how Bush administration officials were so worried about the prospect that CIA officers might be criminally prosecuted for torture that one senior official – Attorney General John Ashcroft – even suggested that President Bush issue “advance pardons” for those engaging in waterboarding, a proposal that he was quickly told was not possible.

    At the core of the legal arguments were the views of Yoo, strongly backed by David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, that the president’s wartime powers were essentially unlimited and included the authority to override laws passed by Congress, such as a statute banning the use of torture. Pressed on his views in an interview with OPR investigators, Yoo was asked:

    “What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? … Is that a power that the president could legally -“

    “Yeah,” Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. “Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief’s power over tactical decisions.”

    “To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?” the OPR investigator asked again.

    “Sure,” said Yoo.

    (emphasis mine)

    • TMC on February 21, 2010 at 04:31
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    War Crimes No Longer Exist

    But this example is the one that tells me Yoo is not just one of those ordinary evil functionary types:

       

    Recall that it came out last year that in a classified August 2002 memoranda, Yoo and Bybee approved such tortures to captured al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah as placing insects inside a “confinement box” along with the detainee, who was to be led to believe the insects were poisonous. They concluded such a move wouldn’t be torture. Here’s a snippet of how they reached such a conclusion. They use the bizarre nickname “Boo-Boo” for Abu Zubaydah:

           

    On June 30 [2002], Yoo asked [NAME REDACTED] by email, “[D]o we know if Boo-boo is allergic to certain insects?” [NAME REDACTED] replied, “No idea, but I’ll check with [NAME REDACTED]” Although there is no record of a reply by [NAME REDACTED] the final version of the classified Bybee memo included the following, “Further, you have informed us that you are not aware that Zubaydah has any allergies to insects.”

    That is the very definition of the banality of evil. I can’t believe that someone who wrote these opinions isn’t being tried for war crimes. And I suspect that nobody in the future is going to believe it either.

    Yes, this makes me want to puke.

    • dkmich on February 21, 2010 at 14:28
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    • Eddie C on February 22, 2010 at 01:22
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    I’ll keep an eye out for you.

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