WAR CRIMINALS ALL!!!!!
"Top Bush Administration officials pressured underlings to use torture tactics at Guantanamo"
"Torture at Guantanamo was sanctioned by the most senior advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense, according to the international lawyer and professor of law at University College London Philippe Sands, who has conducted a forensic examination of the chain of command leading from the top of the administration to the camp at GuantŠ±namo," Vanity Fair will report on newstands today.
The article directly contradicts the administration’s account to Congress, which placed responsibility on military commanders and interrogators on the ground for the practices banned by the Geneva Conventions.
Excerpts from the magazine's release follow. The full story is available here.
Sands reports that these senior advisers face a real risk of criminal investigation if they set foot outside the United States, despite the Military Commissions Act, signed into law by President Bush in 2006. The hitch is that their immunity is good only within U.S. borders, and rather than protecting them, the act may lead to an eventual investigation by foreign governments. For some, the future may hold “a tap on the shoulder.”.... A delegation of the administration’s senior lawyers, including Dick Cheney’s chief counsel (later his chief of staff) David S. Addington, White House counsel (later attorney general) Alberto Gonzales, Pentagon general counsel Jim Haynes, and the C.I.A.’s John Rizzo arrived at Gitmo on September 25. “They wanted to know what we were doing to get this guy [Mohammed al-Qahtani, allegedly a member of the 9/11 conspiracy and the so-called 20th hijacker],” Major General Michael Dunlavey, who ran Joint Task Force 170, which oversaw military interrogations, tells Sands, “and Addington was interested in how we were managing it.… They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in D.C. They came down to observe and talk.” Throughout this period, says Dunlavey, Rumsfeld was “directly and regularly involved....”
--MORE--
And even more!
"’03 U.S. Memo Approved Harsh Interrogations"
"The Justice Department in 2003 gave military interrogators broad authority to use extreme methods in questioning detainees and argued that wartime powers largely exempted interrogators from laws banning harsh treatment, according to a memorandum publicly disclosed on Tuesday.
In a sweeping legal brief written in March 2003... the Justice Department gave the Pentagon much of the same authority it had provided to the Central Intelligence Agency in a memorandum months earlier. Both memorandums were later rescinded by the Justice Department.
The disclosure of the 2003 document, a detailed 81-page opinion written by John C. Yoo, who at the time was the second-ranking official at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.... Mr. Yoo’s memorandum is the latest document to illuminate the legal foundation that Bush administration lawyers used after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to give the White House broad powers to capture, detain and interrogate suspects around the globe...
Everything based on that damnable 9//1 LIE!!!!
Some legal scholars said Tuesday that they were amazed at the scope of the memorandum.
“This is a monument to executive supremacy and the imperial presidency,” said Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School and the Washington College of Law at American University. “It’s also a road map for the Pentagon for fending off any prosecutions.”
The memorandum gave the military broad latitude to use harsh interrogation methods. It reasoned that federal laws prohibiting assault were not applicable to military interrogators dealing with members of Al Qaeda because of White House authority during wartime. It also argued that many American and international laws would not apply to interrogations overseas.
“Even if an interrogation method arguably were to violate a criminal statute, the Justice Department could not bring a prosecution because the statute would be unconstitutional as applied in this context,” it reads.... Ultimately, Mr. Yoo’s memorandum provided the legal foundation for the group’s final report, which defended the use of harsh interrogation methods.
Similar to the document written for the C.I.A. in August 2002, Mr. Yoo’s memorandum offered a narrow definition of what constitutes torture.
“The victim must experience intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions will likely result,” Mr. Yoo wrote....
Then YOU WOULDN'T MIND UNDERGOING SOME INTERROGATION, would you, Yoo?
This type of sophistry is DISGUSTING, readers!
As for the torture, as an American I am APPALLED and ASHAMED at what is being done in my name!!!
Mr. Yoo... is now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley."
You mean, LIBERAL Cal-Berkeley?
Sigh, readers?
WHERE is the ACCOUNTABILITY for WAR CRIMES?!
