Marcy Wheeler's The Torture 13

Marcy Wheeler has an important piece in Salon naming the The Torture 13.

These key Bush administration officials authorized it, decided how to implement it and crafted the legal fig leaf to justify it.

[Top row from left: Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales. Second row: David Addington, William "Jim" Haynes, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, George Tenet (Wikipedia)]

It's clear that Obama has no intention at this point of pursuing transparency and accountability for what was done in our names the last eight years. There's another name for a government that behaves this way, no matter the rationale and intentions: A tyranny.

Rice approved CIA waterboarding

From the BBC:

The CIA's use of waterboarding to interrogate terrorism suspects was approved by Condoleezza Rice as early as 2002, a senate report reveals.

As national security adviser, Ms Rice consented to the harsh interrogation of al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah, the Senate Intelligence Committee found.

Bush Used Torture to Support Iraq Lies

Update: Mark Benjamin: Bush officials said they only tortured terrorists after they wouldn't talk. New evidence shows they planned torture soon after 9/11 -- and used it to find links between al-Qaida and Saddam. Mike Madden: Rumsfeld: Architect of torture The secretary of defense began laying the groundwork for detainee abuse years before Abu Ghraib.

Bush and Cheney approved torture to get false information to support their lies to the American people to invade Iraq.

From Report: Abusive tactics were used to find Iraq-al Qaida link:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist

Secret Torturing US Government

From Tom Lasseter at McClatchy:

The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.

It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials. ...

Bush Stonewalls CIA Torture Tapes Destruction

Do we have a right to know what George W. Bush's role was in the destruction of the CIA torture tapes?

Apparently not.

From the Times:

President Bush deflected questions on Thursday about the destruction of C.I.A. interrogation tapes, saying that he will withhold comment until investigations into the affair are complete.

When the investigations are over, Bush will say: Time to move on.

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White House Reeling from Torture Tape NYT Story

Update: The Hill reports, "Catherine Mathis, senior vice president of corporate communications for the newspaper, stated that the sub-headline [reading “White House Role Was Wider Than It Said” ] has been changed, adding that a correction would be printed. However, Mathis also pointed out that the White House did not challenge the contents of the article."

The White House is fighting against the latest scandal involving the destruction of the CIA torture tapes and White House lying about its knowledge of the destruction.

The Statement by the Press Secretary says the NYT story is "pernicious and troubling..."

Reads the NYT story:

WASHINGTON — At least four top White House lawyers took part in discussions with the Central Intelligence Agency between 2003 and 2005 about whether to destroy videotapes showing the secret interrogations of two operatives from Al Qaeda, according to current and former administration and intelligence officials.

The accounts indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

It was previously reported that some administration officials had advised against destroying the tapes, but the emerging picture of White House involvement is more complex. In interviews, several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed.

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The U.S. Torture Squads: Inhuman and Illegal

A Salon exclusive by Mark Benjamin chronicles the plight of an innocent Yemeni man tortured and brutalized for 19 months.

This is why Republicans block bills in Congress outlawing torture, bills which would make U.S. law on torture clearly in accordance with the U.S. Army Field Manual and international law. Because Republicans under Bush do torture and need protection from the investigations of the civilized world.

Writes Benjamin:

The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated its network of secret prisons known as "black sites." But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on -- there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.

The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation -- one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.

It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with a small piece of metal, smearing the words "I am innocent" in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.

So Bashmilah stopped eating. But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in. The CIA would not let him die. ...

"This really shows the human impact of this program and that lives are ruined by the CIA rendition program," said Margaret Satterthwaite, an attorney for Bashmilah and a professor at the New York University School of Law. "It is about psychological torture and the experience of being disappeared."

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Evidence Of Innocence Rejected at Guantanamo

Update: Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States arguments (are scheduled) be heard at: C-Span 3 11.15 (eastern), 10:15 (central), and ScotusBlog will be (after-arguments)-blogging at 11:15 eastern time this a.m.

The Washington Post has a front-page story by Carol D. Leonnig detailing the plight on an innocent man, student Murat Kurnaz, held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2002.

In fact, Kurnaz was and is known by U.S. authorities to be innocent.

The "... intelligence community's consensus view that Kurnaz is innocent is detailed in newly released military and court documents that track his fate."

Excerpt from the piece:

The (U.S. military tribunal) process is "fundamentally corrupted," said Baher Azmy, a professor at Seton Hall Law School who represents Kurnaz. "All of this just reveals that they had the wrong person and they knew it."

He added: "His entire file reveals he has no connection with terrorism. None. Confronted with this uncomfortable fact, the military panel makes up evidence" to justify its claim that only real terrorists are incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.

Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, declined to comment on whether the military now believes that it erred in imprisoning Kurnaz, or to discuss the release of new records. He stressed that a substantial amount of information about Kurnaz remains classified. ...
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Center for Constitutional Rights Argues Guantánamo Due Process Case at SC Today

Update II: Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States arguments can be heard at: C-Span 3 11.15 (eastern), 10:15 (central).

Update: ScotusBlog will be (after-arguments)-blogging at 11:15 eastern time this a.m.

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) argues the Bush administration's nightmare case today, Al Odah v. United States, before the U.S. Supreme Court.

A companion case, Boumediene v. Bush, is also being argued today.

In Al Odah v. United States, the CCR is attempting to restore the right of accused inmates to challenge their detention and conditions of confinement, a long-cherished legal principle known as habeas corpus.

Numerous people held at Guantánamo Bay are believed to be innocent, and several have already been freed and sent back to their native countries.

But though the Bush administration retains a harsh and hostile view of civil liberties, even those inmates later found to be guilty deserve due process and access to an impartial court, according to liberty-supporting communities the world-over.

A decision against the Bush administration could put an end to indefinite detention and mandate an opportunity to be heard before an impartial court, a result that the Bush administration attempts to block.

As CCR webpage reads:

On June 28, 2004, the Supreme Court held in Rasul v. Bush, that the nearly-600 men imprisoned by the U.S. government in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba had a right of access to the federal courts, via habeas corpus and otherwise, to challenge their detention and conditions of confinement. Subsequent to this
decision, the habeas petitions were remanded to the district court for further proceedings.

Immediately after the Supreme Court's decision in Rasul, CCR and cooperating counsel filed 11 new habeas petitions in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of over 70 detainees.

These cases eventually became the consolidated cases of Al Odah v. United States and Boumediene v. Bush, the leading cases determining the significance of the Supreme Court's decision in Rasul, the rights of non-citizens to challenge the legality of their detention in an offshore U.S. military base, and the constitutionality of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Al Odah v. U.S. Amicus Briefs page

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Canadian Federal Court: U.S. Does Torture

Karl Rove, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are ideologues of different abilities and temperaments.

But one thing they all share in their rigid, authoritarian ideology is their enthusiasm to torture people, and then lie about it.

Human rights attorney and Harper's writer Scott Horton reports on a key decision announced last Thursday by Canada’s Federal Court.

Writes Horton: "Here’s the short version: '''We do not torture?' That claim has been formally reviewed by a court and found to be a lie."

Horton's longer version (and the work of Professor Jaya Ramji-Nogales) are worth reading, if you object to torture and our government lying about torturing, especially innocent people.
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DoJ Official Experienced Waterboarding, Told WH It Is Illegal, Was ‘Forced Out’

Via ThinkProgress:

Last night, ABC World News reported that in 2004 then-acting assistant attorney general Daniel Levin was so concerned about the administration’s use of waterboarding that he went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure himself.

Levin took over former Office of Legal Counsel Jack Goldsmith’s job when he resigned and immediately began reassessing the administration’s interrogation techniques.

Levin released a new memo in Dec. 2004 that replaced the 2002 Bybee memo. Levin’s memo declared that “Torture is abhorrent” but also cautioned in a footnote that his memo was not declaring the administration’s previous opinions illegal. “The White House, with Alberto Gonzales as the White House counsel, insisted that this footnote be included in the memo.”

ABC reported that after Levin personally experienced waterboarding, he told the White House that it could be considered torture:

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn’t die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision. And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use.

Levin was working on a second memo that would have imposed tighter controls on the use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding. While working on that memo, ABC reported “Levin was forced out of the Justice Department when Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General.” Watch it:

ABC’s Jan Crawford Greenburg reported, “Sources said Levin was seen as too independent by the Bush administration — not someone who could be counted on to endorse White House policies.”
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