George W. Bush & Dick Cheney approved of this:

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This is what the Bush administration says was not torture.

Every single one of those methods was specifically approved by President Bush. These are the methods that were used by the CIA that Dick Cheney says we should continue to use. Both Bush and Cheney insist that those methods are not torture because their appointed political hacks in the Justice Department produced written memos, at the request of President Bush, permitting their use on detainees.

Just as Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans manufactured "evidence" to support the invasion of Iraq, the Justice Department manufactured memos to support torture. The Goppies have no morals and no core principles. It's all about what's good for them. Period. Whatever it takes for them to do whatever it is that they want to do at the moment is fine with them. And they sell this BS to their ignorant followers who are easily manipulated by appealing to their baser instincts.

Either war crimes are prosecuted in this country or they are not, and, if they are not, that will be a dangerous precedent.

P.S. -- Added 4/18/09: We now know from the four torture memos released April 16, that all of those reports compiled by the Red Cross from interviews with the C.I.A. detainees are accurate. All of those tactics were specifically authorized in the memos concocted by Bush's DOJ flunkies to authorize torture. The one tactic that was authorized but that is not reported in any of the Red Cross interviews is the use of a stinging insect in the enclosed box with the detainee (Abu Zubaydah) because that tactic was not actually employed.

It's amazing how the Red Cross was able to get truthful interviews out of these detainees. They were all interviewed separately and they had been kept separated from each other in detention, so there was no conversation among themselves. It looks like they got the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

In at least one of the four torture memos, Jay Bybee writes that the methods authorized may not hold up to judicial review because the courts may consider them to be torture. Well, duh! Waterboarding is specifically spelled out as being illegal under U.S. law. Even the judge the Bush administration appointed to handle the Guantanamo cases has said that the U.S. engaged in torture.

You cannot stick someone naked in a cold (air-conditioned) cell, dose them with cold water every hour around the clock and keep loud rock music blasting 24/7 and then say that that's not torture just because it's not specifically mentioned in U.S. law. I don't think there is any doubt whatsoever that the forced stress positions and the extended sleep deprivation amounts to torture.

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From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against a prisoner from Al Quaeda was ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew, according to former intelligence officials and a footnote in a newly released legal memorandum.

The escalation to especially brutal interrogation tactics against the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, including confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall, was ordered by officials at C.I.A. headquarters based on a highly inflated assessment of his importance, interviews and a review of newly released documents show.

Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.

Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.”

C.I.A. officers adopted these techniques only after the Justice Department had given its official approval on Aug. 1, 2002, in one of four formerly secret legal memos on interrogation that were released Thursday.

A footnote to another of the memos described a rift between line officers questioning Abu Zubaydah at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand and their bosses at headquarters, and asserted that the brutal treatment may have been “unnecessary.”

Quoting a 2004 report on the interrogation program by the C.I.A. inspector general, the footnote says that “although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within C.I.A. headquarters still believed he was withholding information.”

The debate over the significance of Abu Zubaydah’s role in Al Qaeda and of what he told interrogators dates back almost to his capture, and has been described by Ron Suskind in his 2006 book, “The One Percent Doctrine,” a 2006 article in The New York Times and a March 29 article in The Washington Post asserting that his disclosures foiled no plots. (His real name is Zein al-Abideen Mohamed Hussein.)

[...]

Abu Zubaydah gave up perhaps his single most valuable piece of information early, naming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom he knew as Mukhtar, as the main organizer of the 9/11 plot.

A C.I.A. interrogation team that arrived a week or two later, which included former military psychologists, did not change the approach to questioning, but began to keep him awake night and day with blasting rock music, have his clothes removed and keep his cell cold.

You can read the rest here.

The F.B.I. has always insisted that they obtained all the valuable information from Abu Zubaydah during the first two weeks when they had him by themselves before the C.I.A. got involved. According to Abu Zubaydah himself, the really brutal treatment, including waterboarding, didn't begin until two and a half to three months after he was captured.

Several high level sources in both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have stated that the information the C.I.A. obtained with their brutal interrogation tactics was all garbage. He had already given up everything he knew before the brutal tactics were initiated.

P.S. -- According to the CIA IG report, the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times. Not to worry though, because the Justice Department told them it wasn't torture as long as they followed these guidelines:

...where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water appliaction. See id. at 42. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

Assuming the guidelines were followed, that works out to a maximum of 60 times per month per detainee (2s*6t*5d). ALL of the interrogation sessions of all of the CIA's high-value detainees were videotaped. However, as we have already heard, a certain number of video tapes have been deliberately destroyed. They were destroyed long before Obama was elected. The CIA ordered the tapes destroyed in defiance of a court order because they didn't want to risk any of their agents being charged with war crimes. (In November 2005, in defiance of a court order to preserve all interrogation tapes, Jose Rodriguez, the former chief of the CIA's clandestine service, ordered the destruction of 92 videotapes showing the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.)

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The Numbers Don't Add Up

Something's wrong with the numbers in the CIA IG report. Either the DOJ's guidelines were exceeded or more than three guys were waterboarded. I suspect it is the former.

Abu Zubaydah was the only high-value detainee in custody in August 2002 and the report says that the CIA used the water board a total of 83 times in August 2002. If that number is correct, then I think it probably means that he was waterboarded on more than five days during that period. Would the CIA agents take it on themselves to violate DOJ guidelines? I think not. I think they were operating under instructions from CIA headquarters and CIA headquarters was following instructions from the OVP.

The sad thing about that guy is that the FBI was correct from the beginning. They found out everything there is to know about him during their kindler, gentler interrogation tactics before the CIA took over. Abu Zubaydah was not a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle or even a senior member of Al Qaida. He was in charge of logistics for the Afghan training camps. The FBI found out everything there was to get out of this guy, including the naming of KSM as the 9/11 mastermind, before the CIA took over and started roughing him up.

If you read Jay Bybee's memos, it is clear that he was working his legal opinions to suit the tactics and not the other way around. This is particularly evident in the approval of the use of an "insect" in the confined dark box with Zubaydah. I even wonder if the request to use an "insect" came from the CIA or the OVP. Dick Cheney strikes me as the most likely person in government to be familiar with Orwell's Room 101.

Bybee told the CIA that they could not tell Zubaydah that they were placing an insect in the box with him that was capable of inflicting severe pain or death because that would be a "threat of imminent death," which is forbidden by law. He recommended that they place a crawling insect in the small, dark box with Zubaydah but say absolutely nothing to him at all about it. The caterpillar's life was spared because this "technique" was never employed. Which is another reason I think this crazy idea came from the OVP and not the CIA.

According to the CIA interrogators in the field, they were under intense pressure from CIA headquarters in D.C. to "get more information" out of Zubaydah. And we know that Cheney and Scooter Libby paid several visits to CIA headquarters to put pressure on them to come up with "useful" evidence in support of an invasion of Iraq. Zubaydah's most intense interrogation was in August 2002. He wasn't providing them any "useful" information because he didn't have any, other than what he had already told the FBI.

P.S. -- I think that Obama knows that everything the CIA agents in the field did, they did on direct orders from the Bush White House. Cheney was probably getting daily reports, maybe even copies of the video tapes of the "enhanced interrogation" sessions. It's possible that if the CIA interrogators violated the DOJ guidelines, they did so on direct orders from headquarters.

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Oh! So That's Why!

Bush's chief speechwriter, Marc Thiessen, explains why they tortured the detainees:

"The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely."

They were just trying to help them with their religion.

It's all spelled out in an op-ed in today's Pravda on the Potomac, a paper that used to be respectable before Katherine Graham died and her wingnut son took over.

The writer, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, served in senior positions in the Pentagon and the White House from 2001 to 2009, most recently as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush.

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The Party With No Morals, Still Has No Morals

Have you been following the latest line of reasoning from Dick Cheney and other prominent leaders of the Republican party lately?

The big question on torture, apparently, is not whether it is moral and in accordance with our national values; the question is whether it works.

A long, long time ago when I was still in high school, I was told that was the philosophy of the godless Communists: the end justifies the means.

P.S. -- How many people died during "intense interrogations?" Probably dozens!