Next Stop Accountability
16 April 2009 11:01 pm by Taylor Marsh
This statement from Obama’s Justice Department sends bells ringing across this land:
After reviewing these opinions, OLC has decided to withdraw them: They no longer represent the views of the Office of Legal Counsel.
It really is the height of moral and mental contortions to lay out a plan on how you torture someone who’s been shot, while making sure you’re not making that wound worse, while inflicting another. But that’s what President Bush and Dick Cheney wanted done, as they worked on Abu Zubaydah through Bush Justice guidelines, so the C.I.A. could get it done.
So now, having read the Bush OLC memos that provided the C.I.A. with the cover to do Bush-Cheney’s bidding, President Obama says that even though national and international law was broken, no one will pay a price. Sure, I understand that the C.I.A. operatives who were told by Rizzo, through their C.I.A. boss, that they were legally doing “enhanced interrogations,” won’t be charged and I agree. But I run slam into a brick wall of reasoning thinking the people who provided the legal framework for Bush’s vision of what the C.I.A.’s job was in this won’t get held accountable.
It doesn’t compute.
That is unless you follow a political road that leads to Bush and Cheney’s doorstep that was built by Obama. That’s likely to cause the whole bipartisan, working together, anti division vision to go up in flames.
Sen. Feingold weighs in, introducing the obvious collision of Obama’s good move regarding releasing the OLC memos, with what Olbermann talks about in his “special comment” above:
“I applaud President Obama for his decision to release these memos approving the CIA’s so-called enhanced interrogation program with only minor redactions. This effort to level with the American people is long overdue. I also strongly support the Office of Legal Counsel’s action to officially withdraw these memos, in another repudiation of the previous administration’s disregard for the rule of law.
“The president has stated that it is not his administration’s intention to prosecute those who acted reasonably and relied in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice. As I understand it, his decision does not mean that anyone who engaged in activities that the Department had not approved, those who gave improper legal advice or those who authorized the program could not be prosecuted. The details made public in these memos paint a horrifying picture and reveal how the Bush administration’s lawyers and top officials were complicit in torture. The so-called enhanced interrogation program was a violation of our core principles as a nation and those responsible should be held accountable.”
Count me standing with Russ. Add to it that the door on further investigation and possible prosecution through the release of these memos is opened and, well, this looks a lot messier in this light. Except for the fact that Republicans will block further transparency all the way.
As for the details of the Bush torture program, I know it may sound obvious, but we learn from Bradbury that a “fluid diet” is best when we decided to waterboard someone. Wouldn’t want them puking “aspirating their food,” now would we? But think of the upside. Waterboarding comes with the plus of being able to add “dietary manipulation” to the mix.
More memo snippets below. It’s post Bybee, because he’s long gone and all cozy in his Court of Appeals judgeship (9th Circuit), but at least there are no caterpillar suggestions or “harmless insects” in this one. But “interrogators will do what it takes to get important information.”
The techniques that we analyzed were dietary manipulation, nudity, the attention grasp, walling, the facial hold, the facial slap or insult slap, the abdominal slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, ’stress positions, water dousing; intended sleep deprivation, and the “waterboard.”
Background Paper on CIA’s Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques (undated, but transmitted Dec. 30, 2004) (“Background Paper’) describes rendition techniques.
According to the Background Paper, before being flown to the site of interrogation, a detainee is given a medical examination, He then is “securely shackled and is deprived of sight, and sound through the use of blindfolds, earmuffs, and hoods” during the flight. ld. at2, An on board medical officer monitors his condition, Security personnel also monitor the detainee for signs of distress. Upon arrival at the site, the detainee “finds’ himself in complete control of Americans” and is subjected to “precise, quiet, and almost clinical” procedures designed to underscore “the enormity and suddenness of the change in environment, the uncertainty about what will happen next, and the potential dread [a detainee] may have of US custody,” ld, His head and face are shaved; his physical condition is documented through photographs taken while he is nude; and he is given medical and psychological interviews to assess his condition and to make sure there are no contraindications, to the use of any particular interrogation techniques, See id. at 2~3.
It’s stunning to read these memos. Call it a cleansing of a sort, but it doesn’t relieve the country of its burden unless someone is held accountable.
We also have to remember that this was done on behalf of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney who held this nation in their grip through fear, as they systematically destroyed our reputation and everything this country means to its citizens and the world, all on the altar of keeping us safe, while actually putting us in more jeopardy as they created enemies by the hundreds. But what did we become as a country in the process? We certainly lost our democratic republic status during the Bush years, post 2001.
Walling.
Using OSHA to judge “white noise” ramifications.
Waterboarding, “generally considered to be the most traumatic of the enhanced interrogation techniques,” talked about in clinical ruthlessness. But no more than “5 days” in any “30-day period.” Good to know.
It’s all just so stunning.
Knowing what happened is one thing. Committing to holding those who crafted the ways to cover for the means is another.
