Torture Policy came from the White House

[lame54]

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=10554
The White House has stopped short of denying any involvement in the affair, while the Justice Department and the CIA's internal watchdog have opened a preliminary inquiry.

Kiriakou told NBC news Tuesday that the decision to use waterboarding came from President George W. Bush's administration.

"This was a policy decision that was made at the White House with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department," he said.

[madokie]

1. I don't trust this Kiriakou fellow for a second

and would not base any belief on anything on what he says but thats just me. I've had to deal with his kind before

[malaise]

2. but

I trust that WH even less.

[madokie]

6. Oh yes I believe the orders came from the whitehouse but

this dude gives me the creeps, listen closely to what he says and from one interview to the other, he sounds like to me to be making stuff up as he goes. I don't know but maybe thats just me seeing what I want to see though

[EFerrari]

8. I still haven't seen him because I don't watch those shows but

maybe he'll show up at youtube.

We know he's working against Dick Cheney because Cheney has been the one at the center of the struggle between the WH and CIA.

[malaise]

10. He looks like a plant

and he does give me the creeps

[TwilightGardener]

3. He was trotted out for a reason. I don't trust him either. He's working for somebody.

[lovuian]

4. They are war criminals pure and simple

and they tortured prisoners against Geneva Convention

[maddezmom]

5. good book review: The Man Behind the Torture: Addington, Cheney's former counsel and now chief of st

The Man Behind the Torture: Addington, Cheney's former counsel and now chief of staff
The Man Behind the Torture
By David Cole
The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration
by Jack Goldsmith
Norton, 256 pp., $25.95

Perhaps the most powerful lawyer in the Bush administration is also the most reclusive. David Addington, who was Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel from 2001 to 2005, and since then his chief of staff, does not talk to the press. His voice, however, has been enormously influential behind closed doors, where, with Cheney's backing, he has helped shape the administration's strategy in the war on terror, and in particular its aggressively expansive conception of executive power. Sometimes called "Cheney's Cheney," Addington has twenty years of experience in national security matters—he has been a lawyer for the CIA, the secretary of defense, and two congressional committees concerned with intelligence and foreign affairs. He is a prodigious worker, and by all accounts a brilliant inside political player. Richard Shiffrin, deputy general counsel for intelligence at the Defense Department until 2003, called him "an unopposable force."<1> Yet most of the American public has never heard him speak.

Addington's combination of public silence and private power makes him an apt symbol for the Bush administration's general approach to national security. Many of the administration's most controversial policies have been adopted in secret, under Addington's direction, often without much input from other parts of the executive branch, much less other branches of government, and without public accountability. Among the measures we know about are disappearances of detainees into secret CIA prisons, the use of torture to gather evidence, rendition of suspects to countries known for torture, and warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

When the public learns of such practices, usually because someone—presumably not David Addington—has leaked information about them to the press, the administration continues to invoke secrecy to block efforts to hold it to account. After The New York Times revealed that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor Americans' phone calls without judicial approval, in violation of a criminal statute, the administration labeled the program a "state secret" and argued that lawsuits challenging its legality must be dismissed in deference to executive claims of confidentiality.<2> On the same grounds, the Supreme Court in October declined without comment to hear a lawsuit challenging the administration's abduction of an innocent German citizen who was taken to Afghanistan to be tortured, and then dumped on a remote Albanian roadside when US officials realized they had kidnapped the wrong man. The administration argued that the litigation would reveal classified information, and the Supreme Court was unwilling even to consider whether it is consistent with our democratic system to elevate secrecy over all other constitutional and human rights values—including the right not to be tortured.


more:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20858

[verse18]

7. No shit, Sherlock! n/t

[L. Coyote]

9. George Bush Sr. May Face Charges: Conspiring to TORTURE, Kidnap, and Murder Political Activists

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2459135&mesg_id=2459135