Where is the Accountability?

MS. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

Words
A word is dead
when it is said,
Some say.
I say it just Begins to live.
-- Emily Dickinson, c. 1872  

BuzzFlash,

One of my favorites by Dickinson, because I agree, especially if the word or words come from political leaders around the world. Obama just this week brought alive two common words that were never really dead: nuclear and assassination.

Not the first time our leaders have mentioned these two words. There is something about power in leaders that seems to always lead to debt, death, and destruction. This week I understand that we, as a nation, under the Obama administration have signed a treaty:

Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to sign new nuclear arms treaty - latimes.com

The treaty substantially cuts the nuclear weapons that the United States and Russia will deploy and will significantly reduce missiles and launchers, Obama said. It follows a 1991 treaty that expired in December and about which the United States and Russia have been negotiating.   

This is all really great, the attempt in the taming of nuclear power. However, the fact that we will still bump off our enemies using assassination attempts by the CIA per instructions from Obama, just doesn't fit well, in my mind, with a nation trying to avoid violence.

I still remember the horrible sixties and the great losses that this nation had, and I firmly believe that we, as a nation, suffered greatly for the next 30 years due to those leaders that we lost. That said, we constantly are subjecting people to dangers and violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and we still maintain over 800 bases around the world, which spreads fear and paranoia in countries that just might look to the U.S. as an invading and occupying country today, especially after what Bush did to Iraq. How can they trust the US government, when it's very hard for American citizens to do so?

These orders for assassinations, to me, are so Bush GOP. I was hoping that with the Clinton administration, and now the Obama administration, that once and for all, we could rid our government of the Bush crime family's influence and their thuggish ways of doing business. But I guess not. It always strikes me that these people in D.C. are so far away from the deadly decisions that they make for our military and for other innocent people around the world, that we Americans don't have to wonder how in the hell they sleep at night.  

* * * * *

What Gets an American on the White House Kill List?

Feb 5 2010, 4:34 PM ET

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told to Congress Wednesday that the U.S. can target Americans to be killed if it believes they are involved in terrorism. This supports an earlier report that the CIA and JSOC maintain White House-approved "kill lists" of three to four Americans. Blair articulated the policy as requiring high-level approval but did not mention Congressional oversight or judicial review. He described the criteria as "whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans." So far, the only confirmed American target is Anwar al-Awlaki. The vagueness of Blair's criteria, as well as the assertion that Awlaki meets those criteria, raises the question: What gets an American citizen on the kill lists?

A 1981 executive order signed by President Reagan explicitly bans assassination by the U.S. government. However, in 2002, the Bush administration issued a secret finding allowing the CIA to target Americans directly involved in terrorism. American citizen Kamal Derwish was killed in 2002 under this authority, struck by an unmanned drone while traveling in a car with the al-Qaeda organizer of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. The 2002 policy, which did not extend to JSOC, claimed that "enemy combatants" can be killed, a phrase that the Obama administration does not use.      

* * * * *  

The arrogance of such threats to kill, not only American citizens, but to kill others around the world, and we Americans have seen this type of killing already. Drones killing people in Pakistan, and we are told (paraphrasing) they were nobodies, they were dangerous "terrorists," (the idiot word of the century made popular by one of its own, idiot, of course). Or oops! They were actually innocent families and were killed as if they were just nothing more than ashes to ashes or dust to dirt or U.S. collateral damage.

I still remember the carelessness and the atrocities reported in Iraq. By the way, with the deaths of two reporters in the news as well as people targeted with cameras and not guns, how many Americans remember that at least 70 journalists and photographers were killed in Iraq, and most of them by the Bush U.S. military. Eh? Bush did not want anyone photographing or reporting, who was not connected to the U.S. military.

Also, probably not reported here in the U.S., there were families killed at check points, trying to get the hell out of Iraq. Families being killed by weapons that were being tested for use. Gory descriptions of what those weapons did. Our own military and leaders appointing themselves as judge and jury? Not in a functioning democracy, but in a dysfunctional democracy, yes, we would see this and we are constantly seeing this. I wouldn't want any of them on my jury. Do those types of mistakes sound as if those weapons were in the hands of professionals?

I thought that after Bush, who had several months of warnings before 9/11, and then used that to advance his own bloody and deadly agenda, that this would have taught U.S. government serious lessons about keeping a tight rein on U.S. leadership in power... only after one million people dead and two to three million people uprooted, homeless, and over 5,000, Americans dead, all due to lies, did most of the killing finally stop, but we Americans are still there.

And, let's think for a minute, say Saddam did have WMD. Are we, the U.S., the police of the world, when our own country has the largest stash of WMD? No. It's not our job to invade and occupy another country, killing innocent people and there was no way for this leader to ever get those WMD, which Saddam did not have, to the U.S. All lies. And, branded into my brain is the picture of Bush making fun and laughing as he played at searching for those WMD.

And, yet, today, all of those murders and lies, go unaccountable. Abuse of such power demands accountability for the dead. It's called taking responsibility. If we don't demand that, why should anyone in power think twice about what they do, even when it concerns taking lives, and it almost always concerns taking the lives of innocent people. This nation has not had accountability from our leaders since Nixon.

What happens? Over and over again, we have this type of scenario, killing people on the word of our leaders, even one such as Bush, who was never elected, and don't forget the killing Clinton did in Bosnia and the bombing for years of Iraq to please Bush number one. Killing by proxy. They may not pull the trigger, but they are responsible.

What do we have to do to get a government that respects life and is willing to be a role model for a real democracy? I'd like to know. We had to fight to save any lives with a minimal type of healthcare. Vets have to fight for healthcare after being wounded. Women have to fight to be in charge of their own bodies. I still remember years ago, as I've said before, when "rape" was questioned in U.S. courts with lawyers using coke bottles. In other words a woman being raped was not accepted. She had to "do" something to deserve it. How backward was that? Just as backward as hearing that even in today's world, women serving in our own US military were being raped by U.S. military, and not too much was being done about it.

Back to our leaders dishing out assassination jobs or invasions, when none of these people have ever known the violence of war and its lasting affects on the human heart and soul, or have even served in U.S. military. War involves such trauma that it lasts the lifetime of those involved. That is why they hate us.

Tormented from a lifetime of memories of horror. Just review the figures of so many of our own in U.S. military, suffering with PTSD and a lack of good healthcare, who took their lives after returning to this country.

Bush number two went AWOL without punishment. It's too easy for any leader of the U.S. today to kill people. I was always under the impression that Congress should be the watchdog of this type of misuse of power. But, we don't even have that type of Congress today. How many members of Congress have served in a war or in U.S. military, I wonder, and how many tried to stop Bush?

Below, more proof that Obama is just another continuation -- sorta, kinda like Clinton, and Bush number two -- of U.S. government's use of violence and using Bush's joke of the century:

"War on terrorism." We Americans are not that stupid, and our leaders are too far away from the American populace to realize that, unless they are out campaigning, that is. War is terrorism. Assassinations without trial, evidence, or a jury are not and never will be the leadership signs of a working democracy. Where is the passion that goes along with such beliefs. I don't see it in U.S. government, and it hasn't been there for years.   

And, we Americans thought we voted for change.

* * * * *

The CIA, Assassination, and the War on Terrorism by Jacob G. Hornberger

This article originally appeared in the October 2009 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.

Bush’s war-on-terrorism paradigm obviously provides another way to treat suspected terrorists — simply by killing them. No arrests, no Miranda warnings, no presumption of innocence, no attorneys, no trials, and no other messy procedures associated with the criminal-justice system. Not even incarceration in a military dungeon, torture, or trial before a kangaroo tribunal.

Instead, just have the CIA assassinate them.

* * * * *  

Actually, it (the Bush GOP's war on terrorism) started years ago. How many Americans know the history behind this true family of crime?

* * * * *

George H.W. Bush, the CIA & a Case of State Terrorism by Robert Parry

With CIA headquarters now officially named the George Bush Center for Intelligence and with veterans of the Reagan-Bush years still dominating the CIA's hierarchy, the spy agency might be hoping that the election of Texas Gov. George W. Bush will free it from demands to open up records to the American people.

* * * * *  

Of course, Bush was never elected and the Supreme was never punished for putting their guy into the White House. The fake five should have been impeached. Even the Supreme Court should not be above U.S. law. But, hell, U.S. law doesn't seem to be in any of the three branches of U.S. government in today's world.

For anyone interested, the below link is a long article that brings us up to 9/11:

TIME Magazine: Before Sept. 11 — The Secret History  

Where does it say in our Constitution that any President or illegal resident, such as Bush, of the White House has the power to use the CIA to carry out assassinations or even invasions and occupations for that matter? It's always been my belief that since George H. W. Bush was in charge of the CIA, that half of that organization are good people for the country and yet, another half is still under the influence of Bush Sr., and are thugs. A word that has a history and a direct connection to the word that became 'assassination.'

"Thug was first used as a term for a member of an organization of professional robbers and assassins in India who strangled their victims."
-- Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories.

* * * * * 

The threat of an Al Qaeda "Attack on America" is being used profusely by the Bush administration and its indefectible British ally to galvanize public opinion in support of a global military agenda.

Known and documented, the "Islamic terror network" is a creation of the US intelligence apparatus. There is firm evidence that several of the terrorist "mass casualty events" which have resulted in civilian casualties were triggered by the military and/or intelligence services. Similarly, corroborated by evidence, several of the terror alerts were based on fake intelligence as revealed in the London 2006 foiled "liquid bomb attack", where the alleged hijackers had not purchased airline tickets and several did not have passports to board the aircraft.

The "war on terrorism" is bogus. The 911 narrative as conveyed by the 911 Commission report is fabricated. The Bush administration is involved in acts of cover-up and complicity at the highest levels of government.

Revealing the lies behind 911 would serve to undermine the legitimacy of the "war on terrorism".

Revealing the lies behind 911 should be part of a consistent antiwar movement.

Without 911, the war criminals in high office do not have a leg to stand on. The entire national security construct collapses like a deck of cards

-- Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international bestseller America’s "War on Terrorism"  Global Research, 2005. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization.       

* * * * *  

I'm only bringing this up again because it's still going on even with Obama. This fake, so-called "war on terror." We, the U.S. and our leaders, such as both of the Bushes, have been the largest terrorists around the world, along with members of the CIA doing the bidding of these leaders and killing people when they don't even know for sure, "they just think they might be terrorists, which is what happened in Iraq and Pakistan" and this has been a proven fact. This makes the U.S. no different from any other outlaw country that goes around killing innocent citizens, such as our own innocent citizens were killed on 911. And what did Bush do to please those Americans wanting blood, anybody's blood? He bombed Afghanistan and killed up to 5,000 innocent citizens and never did get bin Laden, whose family just happened to be Bush family friends.

More facts that happened back then: At least 100 members of the bin Laden family were allowed to leave this country by Bush, without being questioned by the FBI, during the U.S. ordered fly down.

Also in the news this week is a report of a guy on a U.S. flight smoking a cigarette in the bathroom and when he is discovered, it's as if the professionals or upper class were left at home and the incident was being handled by the freshman. Whenever I hear of such idiocy, I have to think of the poor and very ignorant woman who made the mistake of believing some talking Bush GOP sap who was telling Americans that duct tape would protect them from an attack, and she wrapped her two children and herself into a small compartment and they smothered to death. 

When we have people in government being paid large salaries, they should be expected to know what the hell they are doing and what they are talking about. I personally am sick and tired of the slick phrases and parroted themes dished out to the populace by U.S. government. The same themes that were used constantly for the full eights years of the Bush GOP regime.   That was the kind of leadership that we in the U.S. did not need.

However, we do still need accountability. But what does Bush get for his continuing eight years of debt, death, and destruction all on his so-called quest of "fighting a war on terror?"  A library and speaking engagements. More proof that these leaders represent only the top 1 to 5 percent of the U.S. population, and that is the real change that we must achieve in this nation.

Which brings us to today, and since the Obama administration, just as the Clinton administration, refuses to demand accountability for the lives taken so frivolously by the Bush GOP regimes, and forge on ahead as if they meant nothing, nothing will change. Absolutely nothing. Just as it was during the eight years of the Clinton administration, and today, during the Obama administration, we have constant threats of violence from the Right Wing of the Republican Party, and the leaders of that party do nothing. We have violence inside and outside this country without responsibility. Bush would have arrested the teabaggers if they were Democrats, because he arrested and had cops at every protest, and these protests were against violence, his violence.

Power without responsibility will continue. Instead of a U.S. government of law and order, we have a government of power among the privileged and elitists. If there is a war going on, regardless of where, it is, in reality, a war against the poor.  

Thanks BuzzFlash,  
Shirley Smith
MS. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

Let The Sun Shine In......

Karl Rove Heckeled at book event

But no one threw rocks or threatened to kill him or his family.

Former White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove was heckled and branded a 'war criminal' at a book signing in Beverly Hills, California, Monday night.

Rove, who served as senior advisor and deputy chief of staff to former President George W. Bush, was at the Saban Theater to discuss his new book, "Courage and Consequences: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight," to an audience of about 100 people who paid up to $40 to hear him.
 
But the audience members were unable to get their copies of the book signed after Rove was shouted down and forced to leave the stage, reported CNN affiliate KCAL-TV.

The event was heated from the onset as several anti-war protesters interrupted Rove's talk to accuse him and his administration of lying to Americans about the threat Iraq posed to the United States - and thus, taking the country into war.

Rove called one heckler a "lunatic." He told another to "get the heck out here."
At one point, Jodie Evans, the co-founder of the anti-war group Code Pink, rushed toward Rove waving a pair of handcuffs - saying she was there to make a citizen's arrest.

"Look what you did ... you lied to take us to war. You ruined a country. You totally ruined a country," she shouted.

As organizers tried to keep Evans at bay, another woman stood up and yelled, "The only comfort I take is that you're going to rot in hell."

Rove, who defended his administration's stance on several controversial issues in heated exchanges with other critics, said the interruptions reflected the "totalitarianism of the left."

Let The Sun Shine In......

Would Karl Rove Lie About His Own Name?

Me thinks he would, but doubt it would work. Most people in the world would recognize the fat, pink frog.

Rove Falsely Claims Bush Administration Never Said Iraqi Oil Revenue Would Help Pay For War

In his new book and in recent media appearances promoting it, former top Bush aide Karl Rove has been revising the history of the Iraq war, particularly regarding the issue of Saddam Hussien’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Today on NBC’s Meet the Press, Rove continued with his Iraq war history revision campaign. Noting that the Bush administration had mishandled the management of the war, host Tom Brokaw mentioned that “the cost of the war skyrocketed almost from the beginning. There was not a sharing of the oil revenue that a lot of people had promised.” But Rove flatly denied that the Bush administration said Iraqi oil revenues would help pay for the war:

ROVE: No, no. Tom with all due respect that was not the policy of our government that we were going to go into Iraq and take their resources in order to pay for the cost of the war. … [T]he suggestion that somehow or another the administration had as its policy, “We’re going to go in to Iraq and take their resource and pay for the war” is not accurate.

Rove’s claim is simply not true. In fact, days after the U.S. invasion, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a congressional panel that Iraqi oil revenues would help pay for reconstructing the country, i.e. a cost of the war. “The oil revenue of that country could bring between 50 and 100 billion dollars over the course of the next two or three years. We’re dealing with a country that could really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon,” he said.

One month before the war, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Iraq “is a rather wealthy country. … And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction.”

Since the start of the Iraq war, the U.S. has spent tens of billions of dollars in reconstruction costs.

Let The Sun Shine In......

A 9/11 Reality Check

Posted on Sep 8, 2009

By Robert Scheer


What if eight years ago the World Trade Center had been leveled by a small nuclear bomb that took out most of lower Manhattan as well? How many millions of innocent civilians would we have killed in retaliation? Would we still be a free society, or would Dick Cheney have attained the power of a demented king, having moved on from snooping on our phone calls and outing honest CIA agents to destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law?       

(Not to mention the most disturbing domestic Cheney/Rove product, Data mining, millions of Americans. While pretty much useless for the purpose of finding "terrorist cells,"  data mining is a high tech way of keeping tabs on Americans most personal information, along with publicly expressed opinions on blogs and comments all over the web.)

As assaults on a society go, the 9/11 attacks, which left 3,000 dead and are sure to be described in this anniversary week as being among the greatest of historical outrages, were something less than that, given the world’s experience with the ravages of war. The countless Russians and the 6 million Jews killed by those so finely educated Germans come to mind. The 3.4 million Vietnamese, mostly rice farmers, whom Robert McNamara admitted to having helped kill with his carpet-bombing of their country, are a forgotten footnote. Yet we who have never experienced such carnage on our home front all too easily poke out tens of thousands of eyes for each lost one of our own.

Surely two planes crashing into office buildings and another hitting the Pentagon doesn’t compare to the leveling of every major city in Japan with conventional bombing, capped off by the mass murder of hundreds of thousands more at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Speaking of eyes lost, mark the words of Hiroshima’s mayor two years ago: “That fateful summer, 8:15 AM. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast—silence—hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted.”


We assumed that the Japanese people would readily forgive us and, having been raised in the spirit of total obedience to their emperor, they accommodated our occupation quite well, even injecting industrial-grade silicon into their women’s breasts to satisfy the erotic appetites of our soldiers.

Americans who blithely claim the moral high ground with every pledge of allegiance to a flag that, because it is American, is assumed to have never been sullied by imperial greed or moral contradiction expect no less than instant and full forgiveness for our “mistakes.” Only last month, four decades after he led the massacre of 500 villagers in My Lai, Vietnam, did former Army Lt. William Calley express “regret” for his crimes. He served no time in prison for the point-blank shooting of toddlers, thanks to the commutation of his sentence by Richard Nixon, who might have been anticipating his own need for a presidential pardon.

In blind and wrathful retaliation for 9/11 we wreaked havoc on Iraq, a nation that our then-president knew had not attacked us, and we continue to slaughter peasants in Afghanistan who aren’t able to find Manhattan on a map.


We, a people whose nation has never suffered a long and widespread occupation, easily gave vent to our most barbaric impulses, assuming the absolute right to arrest and torture anyone anywhere in the world without revealing his identity, let alone respecting a single one of those God-given rights that we claim for ourselves alone. And even when we identify the few we hold responsible for the attacks on our soil, we refuse them public and fair trials even after years of torturing them.


Many of our co-citizens were driven to frothing-at-the-mouth vengeance, not merely be the attacks of 9/11/01, but by the out-and-out lies of the Bush/Cheney administration in the weeks and months that followed, eventually leading to the massive bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq, a nation of people who had zero to do with the events of 9/11/01. 

I knew that there would be an attack on Afghanistan after the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden, even though they asked for proof and the Bush administration refused to give any information at all. But was that the most expedient way of arresting leaders of Al Qaeda. 

I remember well, Donald Rumsfeld saying, when months past without any sighting of Osama, after Tora Bora, that finding Osama is like finding a needle in a hay stack. Seemed to me that the best way to accomplish that feat would not be blowing the haystack to "kingdom come." 

Now, 8 years later, Osama is either dead of natural causes or is still on the loose. Within months of 9/11, we now know Bush and Cheney, plus various Neocons already had Iraq in their sites before they took office and were moving assets to prepare for war with Iraq long before Congress was asked for a war resolution against Iraq

But we do have a saving grace for our experiment in democracy—although unfortunately it did not exist in the Supreme Court or Congress as a barrier to an imperial vice presidency. It is the power of the lone whistle-blower of conscience, occasionally given voice in what remains of our free press and which can influence presidential elections, as happened quite dramatically this last time around. There are those like Joe Wilson, who exposed presidential fraud masquerading as national security concern over bogus Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, and more recently the truth-telling of Ali H. Soufan, a former FBI agent and lead interrogator of terrorists.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Soufan, who was involved in obtaining much reliable information from prisoners before they were tortured, observed that the recently released memos cited by Cheney to back his argument that torture was efficient actually “fail to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism.”

So, Cheney is again proved wrong, but if there had been a larger attack on 9/11, I doubt whether many free souls would be around now to tell him so.


AP / Alex Brandon

Two Afghan men watch from their motorcycle on Saturday as soldiers with the 20th Special Forces Group go on a training mission in Afghanistan.

---

A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
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Let The Sun Shine In......

About Torture, the myths and reality

Scott Horton, who has led coverage of Bush-era wrongdoing, exposes three pervasive myths—and the surprising reason Cheney and Rove are keeping the issue alive.
• A torture memo writer refused to comply with a warning about criminal risks—and exposes the truth about the policies.
 
• Karl Rove and Dick Cheney are convinced that Bush-era torture policy is a promising political product for a party down on its luck.
 
• Donald Rumsfeld gave step-by-step directions for techniques used at Abu Ghraib.
 
• Torture techniques originated from the White House shortly after 9/11—long before they were arguably needed on the battlefield.
 
• Torture was used by Cheney and Rumsfeld to find justification for the invasion of Iraq.
 
• Jay Bybee was confirmed to a lifetime appointment as all eyes were on Colin Powell’s speech to the U.N. about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program.

In the space of a week, the torture debate in America has been suddenly transformed.

The Bush administration left office resting its case on the claim it did not torture. The gruesome photographs from Abu Ghraib, it had said, were the product of “a few bad apples” and not of government policy. But the release of a series of grim documents has laid waste to this defense. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s report—adopted with the support of leading Republican Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham—has demonstrated step-by-step how abuses on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan had their genesis in policy choices made at the pinnacle of the Bush administration. A set of four Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memoranda from the Bush era has provided a stomach-turning legal justification of the application of specific torture techniques, including waterboarding.

Rove and Cheney are convinced that Bush-era torture policy is a promising political product for a party down on its luck. Its success on the political stage is just one more 9/11-style attack away.

As public and congressional calls for the appointment of a prosecutor and the creation of a truth commission have proliferated, President Barack Obama stepped in quickly to try to turn down the heat. A commission would not be helpful, he argues, and he has made plain his aversion to any form of criminal-law accountability.

Republicans, meanwhile, bristle with anger as they attempt to defend against the flood of new information. But, in the end, Obama’s assumption that the torture debate has run its course and that the country can now “move on,” as conservative pundit Peggy Noonan urged, may rest in some serious naïveté: Karl Rove and Dick Cheney have different ideas. They’re convinced that Bush-era torture policy is a promising political product for a party down on its luck. Its success on the political stage is just one more 9/11-style attack away.

The latest disclosures can best be grouped in terms of the destruction of a series of long-enduring myths and the emergence of some new truths.

The Broken Myths

1. Torture was connected to some “rotten apples,” mostly enlisted personnel from rural Appalachia who were improperly supervised.

The Senate Armed Services Committee meticulously documents the abuses that were chronicled at Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base, and other sites and links them directly to techniques that were approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other senior officials in the Bush administration. Even in the case of Abu Ghraib, it shows step-by-step how directions given by Rumsfeld that the harsh techniques he adopted for Guantánamo be imported to Iraq, specifically for use on high-value detainees at the Abu Ghraib facility. Among the 232-page report’s conclusions: “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

2. The torture techniques were derived as a last resort, only after other techniques had failed and that interrogators in the field pushed for their use.

The report shows, however, that the effort to identify and seek authority to use harsh new techniques started shortly after 9/11—that is, in 2001, well before there were any prisoners on whom they could be used. It also shows that the effort had its origin in the White House, specifically in the office of Vice President Cheney and involved a series of people who had Cheney’s confidence.

Conversely, the report (and other documents emerging since its release) shows that interrogators in the field raised sharp objections to the use of the techniques and steadily questioned their efficacy. The team dealing with one prisoner, for instance, voiced the view that he had already furnished all the evidence he was likely to produce and that further waterboarding would be pointless. Nameless “higher ups” overrode their judgment. That group might well include Cheney, who is known to have maintained a sharp interest in this particular detainee and kept on his desk a file marked “detainees” in which he collected data related to the use of torture.

The Senate report documents a series of military officers who raised objections against the use of torture and insisted that their opposition be recorded. And today a further report has emerged from July 2002 (just as the OLC memos were being commissioned), in which the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency expressly referred to the techniques, which were being reverse engineered from the SERE program (that JPRA oversaw), as “torture” and insisted that, if used, they would not produce reliable intelligence.

3. Bush lawyers may have made “honest mistakes” in their legal analysis owing to the extreme pressure that existed in the immediate wake of 9/11, in which they were pressed quickly to give opinions before matters could be fully evaluated.

One of Bush’s OLC chiefs, Jack Goldsmith, makes the argument, now accepted as a mantra-like defense for the Bush-era torture lawyers, that tremendous pressure and short deadlines were to blame for their failure to properly assess the law. The torture memoranda gave seriously faulty analysis of the law, Goldsmith claims, because of this pressure-cooker environment. We should all be prepared to excuse their lapses for this reason. Goldsmith is not the most objective analyst of the question, and his adamant insistence that he was divorced from the process of giving a green light to torture appears less persuasive as time passes. But the writings of the torture memo writers, particularly of John Yoo, look suspiciously like their academic writing, in which they sought to expand presidential power and authority at the expense of the rights of the other branches. It seems more plausible to conclude just the opposite of Goldsmith’s claims—namely, that they seized upon the crisis that arose in the wake of 9/11 as an opportunity in which they could realize their ideas about limitless presidential powers in wartime.

The Emerging Reality

 1. The impulse to torture had a clear motivation: Cheney and Rumsfeld were increasingly desperate to find evidence that would support their decision to invade and occupy Iraq.

The push for application of torture techniques occurred as the Bush administration scrambled to come up with evidence to support its claims that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had links to al Qaeda or was pursuing the development of weapons of mass destruction. Two major spikes in the use of the harshest techniques occurred in the weeks just before the Iraq invasion and the couple of months after the occupation of Iraq had begun. The first spike coincides with a period of difficulty with America’s principal ally, Britain, shortly following the famous Washington meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair in which the latter expressed concern about the lack of evidence supporting claims about a WMD program. Blair had been informed by his attorney general, Lord Peter Goldsmith, that the legal case for invading Iraq was exceedingly tenuous and badly needed to be bolstered with evidence showing an imminent threat coming out of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Also in this period, Vice President Cheney was doing his best to make this case by talking up evidence that proved specious—including reports of a meeting in Prague between an al Qaeda figure and an Iraqi diplomat.

The new documents make plain that interrogators using the new harsh techniques, including waterboarding, were pushing their subjects for information that would justify the Iraq war. For instance, Major Paul Burney, a medical professional attached to interrogation efforts at Guantánamo, told investigators that “we were there a large part of the time. We were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between al Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link… there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.” Numerous other sources involved in the interrogation effort recorded the same intense pressure to secure “results” that would justify a decision that had already been taken in Washington to invade Iraq.

In the end, Secretary of State Colin Powell was sent to the United Nations to make the case for an invasion of Iraq. The crown jewel of his evidentiary case turned on claims supplied by Ibn al-Shaykh Al-Libi that Saddam Hussein had trained al Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical weapons. (AKA Curve-ball)  Al-Libi had been tortured using the new techniques to secure this evidence. It was subsequently determined to be false—offered up by Al-Libi to escape the torments to which he was subjected with the full understanding that this was what his interrogators wanted to hear. By curious coincidence, as Powell delivered his speech to the U.N. Security Council, a Judiciary Committee hearing room emptied out, and the nominee then under consideration got a free pass to confirmation to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench. His name was Jay Bybee, and more than a year later, the public would learn that he had been a principal author of the torture memoranda.

The new reports make clear that torture was used to secure information to justify the invasion of Iraq, but—just as experts from the military and the FBI warned—the information proved false. America’s credibility on the international stage was seriously damaged as a result.

2. The torture trail started and ended in the White House.

The Bush administration went to great lengths to fabricate a narrative under which it agreed to demands from interrogators on the ground to allow the use of harsher methods, effectively “removing the shackles” on their interaction with prisoners. But the Senate Armed Services Committee report shows that the effort to introduce these techniques dates from 2001, before there were any prisoners. It also shows that these techniques emanated from the White House and specifically from the office of Vice President Cheney. Finally, it documents a protocol that was in effect governing the use of the techniques. Interrogators would propose a full program of torture techniques to be applied to an individual prisoner. This proposal would be vetted and approved by higher ups in the CIA (including the senior CIA officials who, not coincidentally, vehemently opposed disclosure of information surrounding their own engagement), and then it would go to the White House, where discussions occurred in the National Security Council. Formal signoff occurred by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, involving her lawyer, John Bellinger. President Bush and Vice President Cheney are also recorded as having been informed and having approved its use. If the torture story is therefore a tale involving a “handful of bad apples,” then, the “bad apples” were sitting at the very top of the government.

3. Experts advised the administration lawyers that their opinions on torture were wrong and possibly criminal in nature and the lawyers attempted to destroy evidence of this fact.

Contrary to the uninformed assertion of Washington Post columnist David Broder that the “memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places,” the newly released documents are filled with evidence that military law experts and others repeatedly warned the Bush administration, and particularly its lawyers, that the techniques being introduced constituted torture and that torture was a federal crime, punishable with penalties up to capital punishment in cases in which death occurred (and it did).

In addition, a senior military lawyer tells me that he directly confronted one of the torture memo writers advising him that the techniques proposed would be viewed by most experts as criminal in nature. He insisted that the memo be rewritten to reflect this risk. But the memo writer refused, he states. Phillip Zelikow, a senior counselor to Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, also described a memorandum he wrote warning of risks associated with the torture memoranda. He explained last week that an extraordinary effort was launched by the Bush White House to round up and destroy all copies of his memo. Prosecutors would probably characterize all of this as reflecting mens rea—a state of guilty mind—a realization by the torture memo writers that they were engaged in a criminal act.

(And they would be right)


Why did the memo writers issue their opinions in the form that they did without signaling the risks of criminal law involved in the scheme that the White House was implementing? It’s likely that they were acting under instructions to issue “clean opinions,” which would make it easier for the White House to act and provide more effective insulation from criminal prosecution to those who received the memos.

The new disclosures have transformed the parameters of the debate. The fallback position urged with increasing vigor by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove is simple and includes both offensive and defensive elements. The critical top note is that torture works and keeps America safe. Cheney repeats this claim at every public appearance. He claims that these techniques yielded information that allowed the U.S. to thwart attacks. But Cheney has been extremely slippery about the details of these claims.

Cheney has also filed papers with the National Archives seeking the declassification and disclosure of two CIA reports, which he notes are in a file from his office marked “Detainees.” Curiously, neither report dates from the period of heavy use of torture techniques like waterboarding—they are from a subsequent period in which information gained is probably being crunched or evaluated in an effort to prove that the application of torture yielded something useful. Critics object to Cheney’s request, but they don’t object to disclosure of information about the fruits of the program. They argue that Cheney cannot be allowed to cherry-pick the evidence as he did with intelligence relating to the Iraq War. Instead, they argue, there should be a comprehensive study of the question that reaches some results—perhaps best in the form of a commission of inquiry like the one that the congressional Judiciary Committee chairmen, John Conyers and Patrick Leahy, have proposed.

Rove’s counterattack takes a different form. He argues, using formulations that instantly reverberated though the airwaves as dozens of Republican commentators took them up, that any effort at accountability would be a primitive act of retribution. Appearing on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, Rove invoked the image of “Latin American colonels in mirrored sunglasses,” claiming that any effort to investigate breaches of law would be a “criminalization of an honest policy dispute” that would undermine the fabric of American democracy.

President Obama and his advisers have reacted to these disclosures through a series of unconvincing gyrations. 

It is clear that Obama’s principal concern throughout this process has been that the controversy surrounding torture will prove a distraction that might encumber his efforts to push through an ambitious agenda including financial-industry reform, bailouts, health-care reform, and an array of foreign-policy initiatives. His steps have been ham-handed. On the question of possible prosecutions, Obama went to the CIA to deliver public assurances that no intelligence officers who relied on government legal opinions would be investigated or prosecuted for what they did. Shortly thereafter, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel and press secretary, Robert Gibbs, announced that there would be no prosecution of legal memo writers or policymakers either—steps violating clear-cut rules about the involvement of White House political figures in criminal-justice matters. The White House was forced to pull back the next day, insisting that the Justice Department would handle these questions.

Obama insists America must “look forward.” He views the torture question as resolved by a series of orders he issued coming into office. But Cheney and Rove suggest another idea. It’s clear that in their view America is just one more 9/11 attack away from a transformation in which their use of the “dark arts” will again carry popular endorsement and provide a powerful wedge issue to use against Obama. Obama’s optimism about closure on the torture issue may therefore be seriously misplaced.

Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national-security affairs for Harper's magazine and The American Lawyer, among other publications.

Could be, Scott, that Cheney and Rove are counting on just such a terrorist attack. More, they may be hoping for one. Even worse, they and their Neocon pals may be busy planning one, feeling sure that the Obama administration and American "libruls" will get the blame. I would not count on that, if I were them. Do they not know that they are being watched?

Let The Sun Shine In......