Centre for Constitutional Rights: It is one of the deepest disappointments of this administration--

[BigBearJohn]

Human rights groups such as Amnesty International and the Center for Constitutional Rights have been outspoken in their criticism:

"It is one of the deepest disappointments of this administration that it appears unwilling to uphold the law where crimes have been committed by former officials," said the Washington-based Centre for Constitutional Rights. The Centre argued that it was not just the interrogators who should face scrutiny, but those directing them.

"Whether or not CIA operatives who conducted water boarding are guaranteed immunity, it is the high-level officials who conceived, justified and ordered the torture programme who bear the most responsibility for breaking domestic and international law, and it is they who must be prosecuted," it said.

"As a practical matter, it's over -- nobody is going to get prosecuted," says Robert Bennett, the Washington lawyer whose clients include Jose Rodriguez, the former chief of the CIA's clandestine service, who has been under investigation for his November 2005 decision to destroy 92 videotapes showing the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. But what if evidence emerges that CIA officials (or contractors, who actually conducted most of the interrogations)went beyond the boundaries that the Justice Department erected? The CIA has consistently denied wrongdoing, but an intriguing footnote to one of the memos says that an internal CIA investigation found that there might have been "unnecessary use of enhanced techniques" against one Qaeda suspect. The memos released last week would be comical if they weren't so tragic about the level of legal hairsplitting. In the case of Abu Zubaydah, the Justice Department lawyer instructed that as long as the CIA did not tell him anything about the insect, and the insect was non-stinging, "the insect's placement in the box would not constitute a threat of severe physical pain or suffering to a reasonable person in his position." Just how a lawyer sitting in his office in Washington, D.C., would know what a "reasonable person in his position" might think is unclear.

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[EFerrari]

1. . . .

"As a practical matter, it's over -- nobody is going to get prosecuted," says Robert Bennett, the Washington lawyer whose clients include Jose Rodriguez, the former chief of the CIA's clandestine service, who has been under investigation for his November 2005 decision to destroy 92 videotapes showing the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah."

I think not.