Documents now made public prove that Philip Zelikow told the Bush administration that their policy of “enhanced interrogations” amounted to felony war crimes. That means the policies Pres. Obama followed after Bush, also ignoring the warnings, are too.
The State Department adviser under Secy. Condoleezza Rice, Philip Zelikow, describes himself as “Rice’s policy representative to the NSC Deputies Committee” covering intelligence and terrorism issues.
Spencer Ackerman of Wired, who received documents from the State Dept., broke the story today.
A top adviser to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned the Bush administration that its use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” interrogation techniques like waterboarding were “a felony war crime.”
What’s more, newly obtained documents reveal that State Department counselor Philip Zelikow told the Bush team in 2006 that using the controversial interrogation techniques were “prohibited” under U.S. law — “even if there is a compelling state interest asserted to justify them.” [...]
This is what happens when a Democratic president and the majority party of Congress who matches him are more concerned with politics than doing what’s right.
Pres. Obama and the Democratic majority Congress, with Sen. Harry Reid and Speaker Pelosi as leaders, all chose not to follow the investigation and find the truth, wherever it might lead.
That was interpreted as tacit permission to mimic what had come before.
[...] Zelikow’s memo was an internal bureaucratic push against an attempt by the Justice Department to flout long-standing legal restrictions against torture. In 2005, he wrote, both the Justice and State Departments had decided that international prohibitions against “acts of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture” do not “apply to CIA interrogations in foreign countries.” Those techniques included contorting a detainee’s body in painful positions, slamming a detainee’s head against a wall, restricting a detainee’s caloric intake, and waterboarding.
[...] Zelikow’s warnings about the legal dangers of torture went unheeded — not just by the Bush administration, which ignored them, but, ironically, by the Obama administration, which effectively refuted them. In June, the Justice Department concluded an extensive inquiry into CIA torture by dropping potential charges against agency interrogators in 99 out of 101 cases of detainee abuse. That inquiry did not examine criminal complicity for senior Bush administration officials who designed the torture regimen and ordered agency interrogators to implement it.
Nothing to see here, move along, now.
This falls heavily into the NO DUH! territory But when you consider an illegal war of aggression that has killed hundreds of thousands of people who never did squat to this country I guess a little torture is small potatoes. Kinda nice they are starting to admit it though.
I’m sure all those soldiers who had half their bodies blown off in a war that never should have been appreciate Rice roaming around the country selling herself as some sort of expert on global affairs. Where she should be is in jail with the rest of Bush’s people. This country will never recover from the treachery of that administration and the failure of the present administration to bring it to justice. How many remember the warnings of those pesky naysayer’s who said if you let one president do it then others will see no reason not to do it either. So it has come to pass.
It gets even better. Most of us probably know that the only thing you’re sure to get out of torturing someone is whatever it is the victim thinks his torturer wants to hear. Emptywheel wrote yesterday that the Bush Administration were informed in writing that the people they were torturing couldn’t be counted on to tell the truth. Part of the justification for the Iraq War was testimony from prisoners who were tortured.
In short, they committed a crime to commit the ultimate war crime – starting a war they had no reason to start.
They knew torture would only be useful to obtain whatever testimony they wanted, but they used it anyway, then used that testimony to justify a war.
Yet I can guarantee you there is no way that anyone in the Bush Administration will be punished for this. Oh, maybe some PFC in the Pentagon mail room, or a GS3 in the White House mail room will be prosecuted, but no one responsible for starting a war on fictitious grounds will ever face justice.
The single bright spot is the naked fear of being hauled before the World Court that keeps these war criminals under virtual house arrest here in the US. I am personally happy Cheney got the heart transplant….maybe he will live long enough to at least be indicted.