Not surprising, as Cheney is a master of bureaucratic infighting and the CYA memo
I agree with Dan Froomkin when he says, “Call Cheney’s bluff,” I also think that if he wants memos releases, they should be reports from the agents in place, and not self serving memos from the OVP.
*If you do not know what Bizarro World is, go here, or better yet, read some classic Superman® comic books….Bizarro, and Superman® are a part of basic American cultural literacy.
Read the whole editorial, it’s brutal, and calls for a thorough investigation of everyone who conspired on this, and the penultimate ‘graph calls for the Congress to remove Jay Bybee as a federal court judge:
These memos make it clear that Mr. Bybee is unfit for a job that requires legal judgment and a respect for the Constitution. Congress should impeach him. And if the administration will not conduct a thorough investigation of these issues, then Congress has a constitutional duty to hold the executive branch accountable. If that means putting Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales on the stand, even Dick Cheney, we are sure Americans can handle it.
(emphasis mine)
Somehow, I do not expect Mr. Bybee to go quietly though.
Hopefully, he’ll rat on his fellow conspirators, but I would not expect that either.
I started collecting links on Sunday, and it appears that the the news has developed in a rather interesting manner, with strong statements that there would be no prosecutions, followed by a retreat by the Obama administration following push back from multiple quarters.
I asked Emanuel: “The president has ruled out prosecution for CIA officials who believed they were following the law. Does he believe that the officials who devised the policies should be immune from prosecution?”
“He believes that, look, as you saw in that statement he wrote, let’s just take a step back. He came up with this and worked on this for about four weeks. Wrote that statement Wednesday night after he had made his decision and dictated what he wanted to see. And Thursday morning I saw him in the office, he was still editing it. He believes that people in good faith were operating with the guidance they were provided,” Emanuel said.
What about those who devised the policy, I asked?
“Yeah, but those who devised the policy, he believes that they were, should not be prosecuted either,” Emanuel said.
“And it’s not the place that we go, and as he said in that letter, and I would really recommend people look at the full statement, not the letter, the statement, and that second paragraph: “This is not a time for retribution. It’s a time for reflection. It’s not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back and in a sense of anger and retribution.’ We have a lot to do to protect America. But what people need to know? This practice and technique, we don’t use anymore. We banned it.”
Once again, showing that, when absolutely forced to by the weight of public opinion, the Obama administration can come around on this.
This is a good thing, because whoever was involved in waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month, about 6 times a day, was not following even the Orwellian rules of Bush and His Evil Minions™.
I watched Keith Olbermann’s special comment from last night on Youtube, as I was too busy wrapping Passover to watch the show.
While I generally agree with him, I find him powerful even when I disagree with him, or find his conclusions lacking, as was the case last night, and I’m not referring to the Kaiser thing.*
In this case, I believe that KO did not go far enough.
While he is correct that letting people off for “just following orders”, as is implied by the statements that those , “carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice,” will not be subject to prosecution.
The State Party in territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found, shall in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.
This is not to say that refraining from after the little fish to target the big fish is a violation of this.
That is a legitimate prosecution strategy.
However, it increasingly appears that President Obama and Attorney General Holder do not intend to go after anyone, and in so doing, they are, but not going after anyone, with the explanation that this is, “moving forward”.
This is a obstruction of the prosecution of these acts is a war crime, and if this means no prosecution, it is an affirmative act to obstruct the course of justice.
Certainly, there are alternate venues, such as some sort of “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” but all indications are that the White House are fighting even this weak tea.
I believe that, in the absence for support for some sort of fact official fact finding process, it makes Eric Holder and Barack Obama accessories after the fact to a crime against humanity.
In the short form, people who actively work to subvert any process of judicial or semi-judicial fact finding inquiry, outside of the context of legitimate activities of defense counsel, are war criminals, including the current President and Attorney General of the United States of America if they choose to continue this course.
That being, said, I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit,‡ and I would be interested in hearing opinions from people with a deeper knowledge of both US and international law.
*The Kaiser committed no war crimes by the standards of the day, notwithstanding the accusations of amputation Belgian babies hands† made in the early days of the war. The rules had not yet caught up with the technology of war, and if the Kaiser were guilty, than every participant in the war would have been guilty. †Ironically, the Belgians, during the genocide phase of their rule over what was then the Belgian Congo DID require their native levees to return a human hand for each bullet fired, in order to prevent them from “wasting” bullets hunting game for food, along with holding families hostage, etc. ‡I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
Note that while the Red Cross did say that medical assistance rendered in furtherance of torturer was unethical even if it was the preserve the life or health of the subject, that the activities of medical personnel did not even fall under this limited scope, but rather that they were, “medical professionals’ role was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners, and that the professionals had ‘condoned and participated in ill treatment.'”
This is wrong, and the people involved should never be allowed to participate in patient care ever again.
That’s my guess as to why Senate Republicans are threatening the nominationsof Dawn Johnsen as head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Harold Koh as the State Department legal counsel if more torture memos are released.
It has been reported that they have told the administration that they will filibuster/place a hold on the nominations unless Obama covers up the torture memos
The people directly involved in this, and hence the ones most likely to face legal or disciplinary action, Alberto “Abu” Gonzalez, John Yoo, David Addington, etc., have no reputation or political pull to get the ‘Phant Senators to do this.
So, it has to be someone who:
Is implicated in the memos.
Has political pull with the base.
Has some sort of rapport with Republican members of the Senate, possibly from their days in Congress.
Sounds like Cheney, and as his latest appearances on the Sunday gas bag circuit, it is clear that he is worried that one of his stalwart supporters of torture will roll on him if they are facing real jeopardy.
One of the things that concerns me the most is Obama’s comfort in continuing to support Bush’s assault on basic procedural civil rights because they serve to reinforce the power of what is now his office.
What they posted was a cover sheet naming the case, and quoting unclassified portions of a UK court ruling saying that it was up to the US to release it, followed by a version redacted by said privilege review team”, which blacked out everything but the title of their report, which is clearly stamped “unclassified”:
The privilege team argue that by releasing the redacted memo Reprieve has breached the rules that govern Guantánamo lawyers and have made a complaint to the court of “unprofessional conduct”.
Stafford Smith described their actions as intimidation, saying the complaint “doesn’t even specify the rule supposedly breached”.
So, according to someone at the Pentagon, by sending an unclassified document to the president of the United States of America, they are in violation of regulations, and could face as much as 6 months in jail.
Sullivan is correct. Dick Cheney’s justification of his own actions, and his condemnation of Barack Obama’s position, make it clear that he knowingly broke both US and international law.
Basically, the question is whether the legal opinions that John Yoo supplied to Bush and His Evil Minions&trade are so outrageous as to justify the termination of his tenure at UC Berkeley law school.
I am of the opinion that Yoo actually broke the law, using the Nuremberg precedents for trying judges and lawyers.
One caveat about this article, ignore Alan Dershowitz, who has actually been a big supporter of torture, going so far as to suggest that judges should authorize it, and not an opponent of Yoo’s position as the writer states.
Since Mohamed is alleging illegal torture, and the lawyers in question had reason to believe that there was a possibility of criminal prosecution, I do not see how this could be anything but a slam dunk case of obstruction of justice:
U.S. government lawyers tried to get a British resident held at Guantanamo Bay to sign a deal saying he had never been tortured and that he would not speak to the media as a condition of his release, according to documents presented in Britain’s High Court.
U.S. lawyers also wanted Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen held at Guantanamo for more than 4 years, to plead guilty to secure his freedom, even though he was never charged with a crime, according to documents released by two judges who ruled in the High Court case.
The documents, relating to a ruling the judges made last October, reveal the U.S. military wanted Mohamed to agree not to sue the United States or any of its allies, and that any rights to compensation should be assigned to the U.S. government.
Any lawyers among my reader(s) want to weigh in on this?
The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.
The report, an account alleging physical and psychological brutality inside CIA “black site” prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
(emphasis mine)
When do we either start prosecutions, or turn them over the Hague?
It appears that I was wrong, they didn’t destroy some of their tapes, they destroyed nearly 100 tapes, 92 in fact.
This is going to continue unless this is pursued up the chain of command, and those in authority at the deputy director, director, and presidential levels are prosecuted.
Those below them need their clearances pulled forever if they cooperate, and jail time for those who do not cooperate.
Our intelligence services will continue to create more terrorists until this is rooted out of both the intelligence services and the body politic.
Just when I thought that this group of criminals have gotten me so jaded about their venality and corruption that they can no longer shock me, it now appears that they instituted rape as a part of their torture regime:
Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading.
…
Third, the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgment that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.
(emphasis mine)
Oh my God.
Waterboarding is the least of it. [ON EDIT: My bad, I left off the link]
No, this isn’t a typo, someone in the DoD is refusing to turn over information to the President of the United States of America:
Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal charity Reprieve, which represents Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, sent Obama evidence of what he called “truly mediaeval” abuse but substantial parts were blanked out so the president could not read it.
In the letter to the president [PDF] , Stafford Smith urges him to order the disclosure of the evidence.
Stafford Smith tells Obama he should be aware of the “bizarre reality” of the situation. “You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by US personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command.”
It is understood US defence officials might have censored the evidence to protect the president from criminal liability or political embarrassment.
George Orwell and Franz Kafka are now spinning in their graves at sufficient velocity to power all of Belarus.
The Obama administration failed — miserably — the first test of its commitment to ditching the extravagant legal claims used by the Bush administration to try to impose blanket secrecy on anti-terrorism policies and avoid accountability for serial abuses of the law.
“Is there anything material that has happened” that might have caused the Justice Department to shift its views, asked Judge Mary M. Schroeder, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, coyly referring to the recent election.
“No, your honor,” Mr. Letter replied.
Judge Schroeder asked, “The change in administration has no bearing?”
Once more, he said, “No, Your Honor.” The position he was taking in court on behalf of the government had been “thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration,” and “these are the authorized positions,” he said.
(emphasis mine)
I Barack Obama decided that since he’s so awesome, we should just trust him.
We also have graphic depictions of what was done to the man (from the 2nd link):
The court papers describe horrific treatment in secret prisons. Mr. Mohamed claimed that during his detention in Morocco, “he was routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss of consciousness. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on his body, including his penis. A hot stinging liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution and death.”
(again, emphasis mine)
Note that the precedent here, US v. Reynolds, is in fact based on a lie. There were no state secrets involved, the B-29 which crashed was not, as was claimed, on a secret mission or testing secret equipment.
They claimed privilege because the report indicated that the aircraft was in poor condition because of inadequate maintenance, and the USAF wanted it covered up. It was all a lie.
Two senior British judges accused the United States on Wednesday of threatening to end intelligence cooperation if Britain released evidence about the alleged torture of a Guantanamo detainee.
The judges quoted lawyers for British Foreign Secretary David Miliband as saying the U.S. government, by reviewing intelligence cooperation, “could inflict on the citizens of the United Kingdom a very considerable increase in the dangers they face at a time when a serious terrorist threat still pertains.”
According to the ruling from High Court judges Lord Justice Thomas and Lord Justice Lloyd Jones, Miliband’s lawyers said the threat had existed for some time and was still in place under President Barack Obama’s administration.
(emphasis mine)
If you think that your behavior is egregious enough that you need to threaten allies to keep it away from public view, that’s a pretty good sign that you should not be doing it in the first place, and that you should be looking at criminal prosecution of the perpetrators.
The term which should be applied to 