No Immunity For Bad Faith Interrogators

[kpete]

Source: The Atlantic

Apr 16 2009, 5:10 pm by Marc Ambinder
No Immunity For Bad Faith Interrogators

Senior administration officials have made it clear to me: neither President Obama's statement nor Attorney General Holder's words were meant to foreclose the possibility of prosecuting CIA officers who did NOT act in good faith, or who did not act according to the guidelines spelled out by the OLC.

So it's not correct to say that the administration granted blanket immunity to anyone.


Read more: http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/04/no_immunity_for_bad_faith_interrogators.php

[EFerrari]

1. That doesn't even make sense. CIA officers who tortured before memos were written

were very likely doing it on a directive from the White House. How is that bad faith? They're criminals but they were criminals carrying out a program.

[Solly Mack]

2. Bad faith torture verses good faith torture

and the torture "debate" in America reaches a new low

Water-boarding - any kind of water-boarding - has ALWAYS been a form of torture. There are NO guidelines you can use with water-boarding to cause it to not be torture. It is ALWAYS torture. So if your so-called "harsh" interrogations involve water-boarding then you're guilty of torture.


And - supposedly - in America, torture is illegal and has been for many (many) years. The CIA knew their actions were criminal. Only a fool or a liar believes they didn't know. I'm supposed to believe that CIA interrogators were ignorant of the laws regarding their profession? Yeah - right. The torture memos were nothing but an after-the-fact attempt at legalizing the illegal. From the White house to the DOJ to the CIA (and DoD/Pentagon) nothing but a conspiracy to get away with war crimes.


Faith-based torture...damn

Yesterday, I water-boarded a man in bad faith.

But today I saw the light. It was shining on my torture is now legal memo. I've been saved! I've been cleansed! I can now do the exact same thing I did yesterday in good faith!


Gimme that old faith based torture
Gimme that old faith based torture
Gimme that old faith based torture
It's good enough for me

Now remember children. There is good faith torture and bad faith torture. Always choose the good faith torture. That way the people can feel better about you and your actions. It's OK to beat someone to death as long as you didn't intend to cause them harm. Do no harm with intent - that's the golden rule of the good faith torturer.

LMAO

[Buns_of_Fire]

3. It would seem to me that torture could be de facto evidence of a "bad faith" interrogation.

Could this be the loophole to go after them anyway? (But, hey, what do I know? I never even played a lawyer on television...:shrug:)

[Seldona]

4. Considering they are announcing no immunity, it seems that way.

Depends on how they choose to interpret 'good faith/bad faith.' It is certainly better than the reports of blanket immunity imo.

[No Elephants]

14. In practical reality, there is no difference between blanket immunity and

what the OP describes. None.

[Metta]

5. Not prosecuting is a cowardly and criminal act. Talk is fairytaling.

So, step up or shut up.

[HughMoran]

6. How many times does this point have to be made?

Actually, there is no point in discussing this as the rageaholics aren't going to listen to any alternative arguments anyway.

[Shipwack]

11. Rageahloics?

Or people with a sense of right and wrong?

There are some lines that should never be crossed, and torture is one of them.

The excuse that "they were told it's okay, so we shouldn't prosecute them" is ingenuous BULLSHIT!

If an authority figure told me that it was ok to rape and kill little girls, would that make it ok to rape and kill little girls? Would I even try to do that?

Hell no. I know right from wrong, and being given permission to do wrong doesn't make it "right". Every individual who tortured (and kept on torturing) under orders is a broken human. Period.

[HughMoran]

12. Nice rant

You completely missed the intention and point of my post, but that's OK.

[No Elephants]

16. Maybe your post was unclear then.

[Iowa]

7. Pathetic...

Now there are "good faith" torturers. F*cking unbelievable.

[Xipe Totec]

8. What does a good faith torturer look like? n/t

[No Elephants]

9. Please, Marc. who do you think you are snowing with that pile of doo doo?

[fasttense]

10. Look forward not backward

All those "good faith" torturers now have a taste for all those sadistic acts the bush and dick let them pursue on the bodies of prisoners of war. What do you think they will do next? We've trained a bunch of CIA officers to tortured, rape and mutilate people. So, are they lying low in the bowels of the CIA just waiting for the next Republicon President to unleash them? Or will they go and find ways to use their newly acquired talents? How about Halliburton and Blackwater(XE)?

[mbperrin]

13. Guidelines for torture. Very nice. Perhaps we should remember a bit

of history:
‘water boarding.’” The technique involves strapping a person to a table, covering his mouth and nose with a cloth, and pouring water over the cloth, until the subject begins to inhale water and drown. There’s nothing new about this method. It dates back at least as far as the Spanish inquisition—when it was known simply as tortura del agua. It was used by Dutch traders in the seventeenth century in the East Indies and was finally banned by most Western countries during the Enlightenment.

In this country, Major Edwin Glenn was court-martialed and sentenced to ten years hard labor in 1901 for water boarding a prisoner in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. The US officially outlawed the practice after World War II, because it had been used against Allied troops by the Gestapo and the Japanese Kempeitai. Indeed, eight Kempeitai officers were executed for water boarding British prisoners, and Japanese officer Yukio Asano was convicted by an Allied court of war crimes in 1947 for, among other things, water boarding John Henry Burton, a US civilian.
http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2008/winter/genoways-torture/

The big claim of the Nazis was they were following orders, that what they were doing was approved. How is this argument any different?

http://www.foothilltech.org/rgeib/english/orwell/primary_sources/nuremberg.html

On 1 October 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg delivered its verdicts, after 216 court sessions. Of the original twenty-four defendants, twelve (including Martin Bormann, tried in absentia) were sentenced to death by hanging.

I personally fervently wish for every lawyer who wrote a memo, every agent who followed those memos, all those who knew and either approved or did nothing to stop it, that each and every one of them be subjected in good faith to these wholesome, guideline-approved techniques just for the pure dee revenge of it.

Because you can be sure if it's okay for us to do it, all others have to do is adopt exactly the same procedures and use them on our own citizens, quite legally.

Wow. It just takes your breath away. This country is finished if torture is officially okay.

[No Elephants]

15. Apparently, torture in the U.S. is hunky dory, as long as you get Attorney Mengele, Esq. to

say it is okay. Elevating legal opinions over the rule of law.

You mean to tell me they did not know the difference between torture and not torture without a legal opinion? Give me a break. And they never read a newspaper or watched TV or listened to radio or read anything online wherein U.S. Citizens and citizens of the civilized world said the U.S. was torturing? Give me another break.

The new Nuremberg defense: Somebody said I could torture them. Waasshhhh.

On the OLC memo: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2008/04/the_olc_torture_mem.html

[HamdenRice]

17. No fair! He actually read the memos and Obama's statement and is making sense!!!

If you've read the torture memos and Obama's statement, you will realize that the number of cases that are not going to be prosecuted is quite small -- those in which criminal intent was negated by good faith reliance on OLC memos.

If you read the memos, it becomes obvious that most of the torture we've read about in news reports exceeded the memos' guidelines and can be prosecuted, as can any that took place before the memos were issued.

[LeFleur1]

18. Renegades

The CIA has always been a renegade organization. They've always had to be reined in and watched. If they were any good at their jobs Bush would have known and thwarted the piddly group of misfits who commandeered airplanes and ran them into our buildings.
It wasn't an attack by another country, it was a group of outlaws who apparently were operating under the radar of the CIA.
THEN, after the damage is done they stoop to torture because they aren't good at anything else.
After all of the mistakes, incompetence, and finally torture, our government says they, and the tortureous administration, won't be punished. The whole thing just gets sicker and sicker.

[HamdenRice]

19. I'll post something about this Monday. The furor over the memos is really about 9/11, not torture

Read between the lines of Saturday's Times coverage. Zubaydah was described as a top leader. Before torture, he gave them useful information but not what they wanted.

Then they pulled a false flag trick on Zubaydah, tricking him into thinking he was being delivered to Saudi intelligence for torture and possible murder.

Instead, he told the fake Saudis that he was relieved that he was in friendly hands and started spilling his guts about Saudi royals who helped pull of 9/11 -- what the CIA called the "Rosetta Stone" of 9/11, which never made it into the 9/11 Commission Report.

Wrong answer!

According to Zubaydah, it was after he told them "what really happened" on 9/11 that the real torture began, and the goal was not to get information; they had that now, and they didn't like what they had. The "real torture" was to turn him into a vegetable. Suddenly, the CIA "demotes" Zubaydah to a low level operative who may have been crazy.

That's why all the Zubaydah tapes were destroyed -- not because they showed torture (after all, they kept the Abu Ghraib pics and tapes). It was because of who Zubaydah implicated.

Obama is playing chess. DU is seeing it as a game of checkers.