Tag: Waterboarding

    “Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” Bush told a Grand Rapids audience Wednesday, of the self-professed 9/11 mastermind. “I’d do it again to save lives.”

huffingtonpost.com

Bold text added by the diarist

President Obama says “We can’t go backwards”

Ex-President and Unindicted war criminal George W. Bush is basically saying “Why not go backwards, look at the wonderful legacy I have left you!”

Yeah, those were WAR CRIMES, the kind Reagan forbid and made illegal under US law, but, now that you have reminded us that the only thing in your legacy that you want to remind us of is how torture worked in your book, I say we encourage George W. to keep talking. Keep reminding us of that legacy, Georgie, cause you sure didaheckuvajob.

More below the fold

Yesterday afternoon, former Republican Congressman and 2008 Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr had the audacity to say, “Waterboarding is torture.”  The reason it took audacity is that he was at CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.  He was promptly booed.

Instead of adhering to the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions, conservative ideological leaders and Republican leaders have decided to shoot for political expediency, stubbornness, and sadism.

Today is Friday, January 29, the year 2010.  Remember this full moon evening.  

According to Newsweek’s Declassified Blog, http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs…

two Department of Justice anonymous sources said that a Senior DOJ official who finalized an Office of Professional Responsibility report, changed the assessment of the torture memo’s creator’s  Jay Bybee and John Yoo’s behavior to “poor judgement.”

But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.)  The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action-which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.  

/snip

Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo-including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture-were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.

John Yoo, a graduate of Harvard and Yale law school, who clerked for SC Justice Clarence Thomas, and served as a torture enabler in the Bush administration at the Dept of Justice from 2001 to 2003, is currently a law professor at the University of CA at Berkeley. http://www.law.berkeley.edu/ph…

Jay Bybee, a graduate of Brigham Young University and BYU’s J Reuben Clark Law School, helped John Yoo write the torture rationalization memos for President Bush during his Dept of Justice Office of Legal Counsel tenure from 2001 to 2003.  Bybee currently serves on the US Court of Appeals of the Ninth Circuit. http://www.fjc.gov/servlet/tGe…

It is not known at the current time when they will be displaying “poor judgement” again, nor how many fatalities might result.

In December 2007, the Washington Post reported on the first CIA agent to openly admit the government used torture. John Kiriakou says that the CIA used waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah, and that it worked.

Recall that it was later reported that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times.

Kiriakou said:

“It was like flipping a switch,” said Kiriakou, the first former CIA employee directly involved in the questioning of “high-value” al-Qaeda detainees to speak publicly.

In an interview, Kiriakou said he did not witness Abu Zubaida’s waterboarding but was part of the interrogation team that questioned him in a hospital in Pakistan for weeks after his capture in that country in the spring of 2002.

He added:

The waterboarding lasted about 35 seconds before Abu Zubaida broke down, according to Kiriakou, who said he was given a detailed description of the incident by fellow team members. The next day, Abu Zubaida told his captors he would tell them whatever they wanted, Kiriakou said.

“He said that Allah had come to him in his cell and told him to cooperate, because it would make things easier for his brothers,” Kiriakou said.

God wanted him to co-operate so his brothers wouldn’t be tortured as well. Man the CIA is good.

Except

“What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he writes. “I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence.”

But never mind, he says now.

“I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”

[…]

But after his one-paragraph confession, Kiriakou adds that he didn’t have any first hand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn’t.

So one of the main arguments trotted out to claim that torture works was a lie. This isn’t surprising given all the lies from the previous administration. This guy was all over ABC News and other places “admitting” his story to anyone who’d listen and telling us that torture worked. Waterboarding saved lives.

It was just another campaign to make us believe lies the government wanted us to buy.  

Last night on Hardball, when discussing why he was opposed to bringing Gitmo detainees over to a supermax prison in Thomson, Illinois, freshman Congressman Aaron Schock (R-IL) defended the use of waterboarding on detainees — with a slight twist.

Schock: “I would not limit our intelligence agencies’ ability to get information from people.  If they have a ticking time-bomb or some critical piece of information that can save American lives, I don’t believe that we should limit waterboarding or quite frankly any other alternative torture technique, if it means saving Americans’ lives.”

For the moment, leaving aside Schock’s boilerplate right-wing justifications for why he believes waterboarding is a good thing, I will give him a small, small modicum of credit for admitting what Dick Cheney will not — that waterboarding does, in fact, constitute torture.  I would even argue that Schock went one step further than even NPR, whose ombudsman Alicia Shepherd explicitly banned the use of the word “torture” when referring to waterboarding or other brutal interrogation methods authorized by the Bush Administration.

That said, Schock still has no idea what the hell he’s talking about, and calling it torture instead of “enhanced interrogation techniques” is mostly a cosmetic change when he’s still advocating for a reprehensible method of interrogating detainees.  He engages in the same denialism that Cheney does by stating earlier in the interview that “there have been no torture techniques, no alternative interrogation techniques, nothing negative in a bad way has happened at Guantanamo Bay,” despite the evidence from multiple reports that say otherwise.  He also justifies the use of torture with the “ticking time bomb” theory, even though counterterrorism experts have roundly debunked that scenario as a myth, and the fact that torture does not yield accurate or reliable information anyway (to say nothing of the evil and moral repugnance of the practice itself).

Still, while I doubt this young Republican’s admission will have any appreciable effect on the public’s opinion of torture (which, sadly, is supported either “often” or “sometimes” by a majority of Americans, including 47% of Democrats), Schock’s words do clearly illuminate exactly what right-wingers are cheerleading.  If only every major media outlet would muster up the same honesty to call torture precisely what it is and the courage to unequivocally condemn anyone who supports it.

************************************

Cross-posted at Daily Kos

So I’m talking to my wife and she says, “If water-boarding’s not torture, why don’t we do it to kids who misbehave in school?”

I’m thinking of putting together a petition and going door-to-door. Present it to the local PTA with a few thousand signatures on it. Maybe they’ll build “The Dick ‘Dick’ Cheney Waterboarding Our Children Memorial Wing” onto the school? Make it big enough to do 20 or 30 at a time.

So what else can we use waterboarding for, since it’s not torture?

Should I waterboard the dog when he pees on the rug? The neighbor’s kid when he keeps throwing his damned ball in my yard? (“GET OFF MY LAWN!”)

How ’bout letting cops waterboard criminals who won’t confess? Speeders? People who ride a bike without a helmet?

Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments.

“Waterboarding. It isn’t just for breakfast, any more.”

We watched Christopher Hitchens and Erich “Mancow” Muller spend a few seconds on a waterboard and emerge convinced that waterboarding is torture. While I welcome their conversions, their stunts really did not teach us anything new. Though the initial panic of having water come at them was suffering enough, they both quit before the real effects of waterboarding kicked in: they have no idea what would come if the torture did not stop when they cried “uncle.”

Torture is the systematic use of trauma to provoke a change in consciousness: the only goal of torture is to drive a person to unbearable madness. The purpose of the torture — interrogation, extortion — immaterial. Mancow and Hitchens spent a short time on the waterboard and saw that rabbithole in the distance. They bailed before any of the real terror kicked in…

But what if ending the torture at will was not an option? What if they would have undergone waterboarding as Bybee prescribed?

Yesterday a good thing happened, one of the Conservative talk radio torture apologists had himself waterboarded and after six seconds of it he was ready to call it what it is, torture, pure and simple. The Dog thinks this is a good first step, but we are not at the level where people realize how bad it is. What the Mancow had done to him was superficially like the waterboarding torture that we inflicted on Abu Zabaydah and Khalid Sheik Mohamed but it was in no way the full blow thing.