7,000 Pages of Justice Dept-CIA Torture Documents

[maddezmom]

7,000 Pages of Justice Dept-CIA Torture Documents
By Spencer Ackerman 04/24/2008 08:47AM
A coalition of civil-liberties groups filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents detailing discussions between the CIA, the White House and the Justice Dept. relating to CIA's interrogation program. It turned out, according to the Washington Post, that a staggering 7,000 pages of documentation on the program exist. Or as the Post put it:

The flow of documents, by itself, also suggests that the CIA's unorthodox interrogation program was the focus of behind-the-scenes debate at the highest levels of the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The documents indicate that lawyers at the CIA and elsewhere were aware that CIA personnel might be subject to criminal prosecution or other legal sanctions.

You think? De-euphemized, this means that, as reported in this piece, culpability for torture isn't on the shoulder's of the interrogators. It's on the shoulders of the highest levels of the administration -- the ones who ordered the illegality, condoned it, covered it up, and apologized for it.

Despite the FOIA, most of the torture documents remain classified. But there are some indications of what's contained. First, the Justice Dept.'s Office of Legal Counsel, under torture-condoning chief Steve Bradbury, had at least 12 torture discussions with CIA in 2005 and 2006 -- after a famous December 2004 OLC memo ostensibly retreating from John Yoo's 2002 justifications for torture. Second, there's this, from the Post:

more:http://www.washingtonindependent.com/view/7-000-pages-of

[jimshoes]

1. They all must have figured there would

never be any repercussions, legal or otherwise about the use of torture in their quest for Iraq's oil and global dominance in general. They certainly never expected to have to hand over papers dealing with their use of torture and who OK'd it (hint... it was chimpy) Even still, none of them are worried about ever having to be held to account for any of it. They've all got get out of jail free cards. Hell, they own the jails. In short we're screwn. Sadly, unquestionably, screwn. I am depressed.

[Usrename]

2. Much of the torture did not even comport with Yoo's justification.

John Yoo's theory, as I understand it, was that torture could always be used to obtain actionable intelligence to thwart crimes.

I don't think that even Yoo (as screwed up as he is) or anyone else ever argued that torture was an acceptable method to use to obtain confessions and admissions so that they could be used as evidence in official proceedings.

But that turned out to be one of the reason why we were actually torturing people. The 9/11 Commission used waterboarding to gather most of the evidence for their infamous report. Unhappy with the information that the interrogators were providing to the Commission, they wrote their own lists of questions to be furnished to the interrogators that were actually waterboarding the detainees.

Some estimates are that over 200 of the footnotes in the 9/11 Commission Report contain evidence and confessions that were obtained by torture.

As far as I know, the Nuremburg priciples do not take into account whether or not the commissioners participated in torture themselves, just the fact that it was done at their request is enough to allow punishing them for war crimes.



This is the 9/11 Commission that I'm talking about here. They are all part of the torture regime.



They were only selected because they were suposed to be the most trustworthy politicians that were available for this duty.

It boggles the mind, doesn't it?

They even make some subtle admissions about this behavior in their own report, but no one was able to positively connect it all until after the CIA confirmmed that they destroyed the waterboarding tapes.

I did another post on this subject a while ago, with excerpts and pictures and links and stuff:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2841686&mesg_id=2841967

[maddezmom]

3. please repost that in it's own thread

:hi:

[Usrename]

4. Nothing to see here...

...move along folks.