I started posting on HowieinSeattle in 11/04, following progressive American politics in the spirit of Howard Dean's effort to "Take Our Country Back." I decided to follow my heart and posted on seattleforbarackobama from 2/07 to 11/08.--"Howie Martin is the Abe Linkin' of progressive Seattle."--Michael Hood.
Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he will be appointing U.S. attorney John Durham as a special prosecutor to investigate possible crimes committed by CIA interrogators who “went beyond the legal guidelines” for interrogations set out by the Bush administration.
Human Rights Watch responded to the announcement by imploring Holder to go further and investigate those who “planned, authorized, and facilitated the use of abusive methods.” As constitutional attorney and blogger Glenn Greenwald has noted, Holder’s investigation would effectively immunize interrogators who complied with the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) interrogation memos, which authorized brutal torture, and ensure that White House officials who authorized torture “will never be held to account.”
In an appearance today on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) echoed the concerns of these advocates. He told Fox’s Megyn Kelly that Holder should not “limit the investigation” to field interrogators and that he should also investigate the people who gave the orders that resulted in abuse and torture, including former Vice President Cheney:
NADLER: Now, the law says very clearly that it is the obligation of the Attorney General to investigate, to see whether crimes were committed, any time there was torture under American jurisdiction. He must do that. If he didn’t do that, he’d be breaking the law. My criticism of the Attorney General is that he should not limit the investigation to people in the field who may have committed the torture, but to people who may have ordered it, such as the Vice President, for example.Nadler has been one of the most vociferous critics of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and its record on civil liberties. In the past, he has said that Bush officials “clearly committed war crimes” and that the Obama administration would be “breaking the law” if it did not fully investigate the Bush administration’s complicity in torture. Most recently, he responded to Cheney’s comments opposing a torture probe by saying that his objections show that he “still fails to understand the law.”
Update In an article for the National Law Journal published yesterday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) suggested that Holder's probe should extend to Cheney, his counsel David Addington, OLC lawyer John Yoo, and other top administration officials because "it borders on unethical for a prosecutor to refuse to investigate the corpus delicti of a crime because of concern as to where the evidence may lead."
When future historians ask how the United States came not only to practice torture but to celebrate it and treat torturers as heroes, a special place in hell among the journalists who embraced and justified it should be reserved for Chris Wallace.
Yesterday, I voiced several criticisms of comments made earlier this week by NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd regarding potential torture investigations by the Obama Justice Department. Shortly thereafter, he emailed me to say that he wished I had contacted him before posting. In response, I invited him to participate in a podcast discussion with me of the issues raised by his remarks and my analysis of them, and, to his credit, he accepted.
This morning, I spoke with Todd for roughly 30 minutes about the relative significance of torture investigations, the implications of failing to prosecute high-level political officials when they break the law, the role of the media in these matters, and whether Todd was expressing his own views or merely repeating what the White House believes (the polling data I reference, along with the media's routine distortion of it, is documented here and here). The discussion can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below (it can be also downloaded by MP3 here or by ITunes here). A transcript will be posted later today.
Contrary to White House wishes, Attorney General Eric Holder may push forward with a criminal investigation into the Bush administration's harsh interrogation practices used on suspected terrorists.
Holder is considering whether to appoint a prosecutor and will make a final decision within the next few weeks, a Justice Department official told The Associated Press. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on a pending matter.
A move to appoint a criminal prosecutor is certain to stir partisan bickering that could create a distraction to President Barack Obama's efforts to push ambitious health care and energy reform.
Obama has repeatedly expressed reluctance to having a probe into alleged Bush-era abuses and resisted an effort by congressional Democrats to establish a "truth commission," saying the nation should be "looking forward and not backwards."
Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller said Holder planned to "follow the facts and the law."
"We have made no decisions on investigations or prosecutions, including whether to appoint a prosecutor to conduct further inquiry," he told the AP on Saturday. "As the attorney general has made clear, it would be unfair to prosecute any official who acted in good faith based on legal guidance from the Justice Department."
Newsweek magazine, which first reported the development, said Holder was aware of the political implications of having a probe and preferred not to create unnecessary trouble for the White House. Still, the attorney general was troubled by what he learned in reports about the treatment of prisoners at the CIA's "black sites."
The probe would focus in part on whether CIA personnel tortured terrorism suspects after Sept. 11, 2001. Holder has said those who acted within the government's legal guidance will not be prosecuted, but has left open the possibility of pursuing those who went beyond the guidance and broke the law.
Holder has discussed with his staff the possibility of a prosecutor, saying he needed someone with "gravitas and grit," the magazine reported. In the end, the attorney general asked for a list of 10 candidates, five from within the Justice Department and five from outside.
"I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," Holder told Newsweek. "But that can't be a part of my decision."
Allegations of abuse and neglect at a US detention facility in Afghanistan have been uncovered by the BBC.
Former detainees have alleged they were beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs at the Bagram military base.
The BBC interviewed 27 former inmates of Bagram around the country over a period of two months.
The Pentagon has denied the charges and insisted that all inmates in the facility are treated humanely.
All the men were asked the same questions and they were all interviewed in isolation.
Ill-treatment
They were held at times between 2002 and 2008 and they were all accused of belonging to or helping al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
None were charged with any offence or put on trial; some even received apologies when they were released.
Just two of the detainees said they had been treated well.
Many allegations of ill-treatment appear repeatedly in the interviews: physical abuse, the use of stress positions, excessive heat or cold, unbearably loud noise, being forced to remove clothes in front of female soldiers.
In four cases detainees were threatened with death at gunpoint.
"They did things that you would not do against animals let alone to humans," said one inmate known as Dr Khandan.
"They poured cold water on you in winter and hot water in summer. They used dogs against us. They put a pistol or a gun to your head and threatened you with death," he said.
"They put some kind of medicine in the juice or water to make you sleepless and then they would interrogate you."
The findings were shown to the Pentagon.
Lt Col Mark Wright, a spokesman for the US Secretary of Defence, insisted that conditions at Bagram "meet international standards for care and custody".
Col Wright said the US defence department has a policy of treating detainees humanely.
"There have been well-documented instances where that policy was not followed, and service members have been held accountable for their actions in those cases," he said.
'Legal black hole'
Bagram has held thousands of people over the last eight years and a new detention centre is currently under construction at the camp.
Some of the inmates are forcibly taken there from abroad, especially Pakistanis and at least two Britons.
Since coming to office US President Barack Obama has banned the use of torture and ordered a review of policy on detainees, which is expected to report next month.
But unlike its detainees at the US naval facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the prisoners at Bagram have no access to lawyers and they cannot challenge their detention.
The inmates at Bagram are being kept in "a legal black-hole, without access to lawyers or courts", according to Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, a legal support group representing four detainees.
She is pursuing legal action that, if successful. would grant detainees at Bagram the same rights as those still being held at Guantanamo Bay.
But the Obama administration is trying to block the move.
Last year, the US Supreme Court ruled that detainees at Guantanamo should be given legal rights.
Speaking on the presidential campaign trail, Barack Obama applauded the ruling: "The court's decision is a rejection of the Bush administration's attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo.
"This is an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus."
Ms Foster accuses the new administration of abandoning that position and "using the same arguments as the Bush White House".
In its legal submissions, the US justice department argues that because Afghanistan is an active combat zone it is not possible to conduct rigorous inquiries into individual cases and that it would divert precious military resources at a crucial time.
They also argue that granting legal rights to detainees could harm Mr Obama's "ability to succeed in armed conflict and to protect United States' forces" by limiting his powers to conduct military operations.
A US federal appeals court judge is expected to rule soon.
These revelations come at a time when Mr Obama is trying to re-set Washington's relationship with the Muslim world and trying harder than ever to win the war in Afghanistan.
It is a controversy that threatens to damage the image of the new administration in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Today’s Washington Post has a big story about Dick Cheney and torture that’s important for a number of reasons, not least because it raises still more doubts about the CIA documents that purported to detail what members of Congress were told and when about the use of torture.
The story reports that Cheney personally oversaw four or more briefings of members of congress about the torture program as part of an aggressive campaign in 2005 to maintain support for the use of torture.
But here’s the thing: The CIA documents that Republicans have widely cited as proof that Nancy Pelosi lied about what she knew didn’t mention Cheney’s presence at these briefings. Instead, as WaPo notes, the docs said that the info about who oversaw those particular briefings was “not available.”
Pelosi was broadly pilloried by Republicans and neutral observers for saying the CIA lied. Yet here’s yet more evidence that the CIA’s documents were incomplete at best and willfully misleading at worst.
The story also raises an important question: Why did the CIA omit from those documents any mention of Cheney’s presence at any of these briefings? Was the claim that the info was “not available” an outright falsehood designed to cover up Cheney’s role?
Top officials from the Bush administration have hit upon a revealing new theme as they retrospectively justify their national security policies. Call it the White House 9/11 trauma defense.
"Unless you were there, in a position of responsibility after September 11, you cannot possibly imagine the dilemmas that you faced in trying to protect Americans," Condoleezza Rice said last month as she admonished a Stanford University student who questioned the Bush-era interrogation program. And in his May 21 speech on national security, Dick Cheney called the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, a "defining" experience that "caused everyone to take a serious second look" at the threats to America. Critics of the administration have become more intense as memories of the attacks have faded, he argued. "Part of our responsibility, as we saw it," Cheney said, "was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America."
I remember that morning, too. Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face. Once in the bomb shelter, Cheney assembled his team while the crisis managers on the National Security Council staff coordinated the government response by video conference from the Situation Room. Many of us thought that we might not leave the White House alive. I remember the next day, too, when smoke still rose from the Pentagon as I sat in my office in the White House compound, a gas mask on my desk. The streets of Washington were empty, except for the armored vehicles, and the skies were clear, except for the F-15s on patrol. Every scene from those days is seared into my memory. I understand how it was a defining moment for Cheney, as it was for so many Americans.
Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."
I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.
Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.
I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.
The first response they discussed was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration's leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea. Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in his book, "Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq," that high-level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks -- a request Duelfer refused. (A recent report indicates that the suggestion came from the vice president's office.) Nevertheless, the lack of evidence did not deter the administration from eventually invading Iraq -- a move many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.
On detention, the Bush team leaped to the assumption that U.S. courts and prisons would not work. Before the terrorist attacks, the U.S. counterterrorism program of the 1990s had arrested al-Qaeda terrorists and others around the world and had a 100 percent conviction rate in the U.S. justice system. Yet the American system was abandoned, again as part of a pattern of immediately adopting the most extreme response available. Camps were established around the world, notably in Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners were held without being charged or tried. They became symbols of American overreach, held up as proof that al-Qaeda's anti-American propaganda was right.
Similarly, with regard to interrogation, administration officials conducted no meaningful professional analysis of which techniques worked and which did not. The FBI, which had successfully questioned al-Qaeda terrorists, was effectively excluded from interrogations. Instead, there was the immediate and unwarranted assumption that extreme measures -- such as waterboarding one detainee 183 times -- would be the most effective.
Finally, on wiretapping, rather than beef up the procedures available under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the administration again moved to the extreme, listening in on communications here at home without legal process. FISA did need some modification, but it also allowed for the quick issuance of court orders, as when President Clinton took stepped-up defensive measures in late 1999 under the heightened threat of the new millennium.
Yes, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice may have been surprised by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- but it was because they had not listened. And their surprise led them to adopt extreme counterterrorism techniques -- but it was because they rejected, without analysis, the tactics the Clinton administration had used. The measures they uncritically adopted, which they simply assumed were the best available, were in fact unnecessary and counterproductive.
"I'll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities," Cheney said in his recent speech. But this defense does not stand up. The Bush administration's response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.
rclarke@hks.harvard.edu
Richard A. Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is the author of "Against All Enemies" and "Your Government Failed You."
Dick Cheney says that torturing detainees has saved American lives. That claim is patently false. Cheney's torture policy was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of American servicemen and women.
Matthew Alexander was the senior military interrogator for the task force that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and, at the time, a higher priority target than Osama bin Laden. Mr. Alexander has personally conducted hundreds of interrogations and supervised over a thousand of them.
"Torture does not save lives. Torture costs us lives," Mr. Alexander said in an exclusive interview at Brave New Studios. "And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool...These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse....literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives."
Republicans and the Corporate Media are trying to destroy Speaker Pelosi because she dared to accuse the CIA of misleading her during her (only) torture briefing on September 4, 2002.
Of course Pelosi isn't the only one who was misled by the CIA during the march to war in 2002-2003. We were all misled - the Media, Congress, the American people, and the entire world.
As Bush's CIA even misled members of the Bush Administration, including Secretary of State Colin Powell! Powell's CoS Larry Wilkerson shared more details with CIA veteran Ray McGovern:
“Powell and I had a one-on-one — no one else even in the room — about his angst over what was a rather dull recounting of several old stories about Al Qa’ida-Baghdad ties [in the draft speech],” Wilkerson said. “I agreed with him that what we had was bull___t, and Powell decided to eliminate all mention of terrorist contacts between AQ and Baghdad.
“Within an hour, [CIA Director George] Tenet and [CIA Deputy Director John] McLaughlin dropped a bombshell on the table in the [CIA] director’s Conference Room: a high-level AQ detainee had just revealed under interrogation substantive contacts between AQ and Baghdad, including Iraqis training AQ operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.”
Though Tenet and McLaughlin wouldn’t give Powell the identity of the al-Qaeda source, Wilkerson said he now understands that it was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda operative who later claimed he gave the CIA false information in the face of actual and threatened torture.
Not realizing that the new intelligence was tainted, “Powell changed his mind and this information was included in his UNSC presentation, along with some more general information from the previous text about Baghdad's terrorist tendencies,” Wilkerson said...
“As you can see, nowhere were we told that the high-level AQ operative had a name, or that he had been interrogated [in Egypt] with no US personnel present or much earlier rather than just recently (the clear implication of Tenet's breathtaking delivery),” Wilkerson said.
“And not a single dissent was mentioned (later we learned of the DIA dissent) … All of this was hidden from us – the specific identity, we were informed, due to the desire to protect sources and methods as well as a cooperative foreign intelligence service. …
“As for me in particular, I learned the identity of al-Libi only in 2004 and of the DIA dissent about the same time, of al-Libi's recanting slightly later, and of the entire affair's probably being a Tenet-McLaughlin fabrication – to at least a certain extent – only after I began to put some things together and to receive reinforcement of the ‘fabrication’ theme from other examples.”
So the CIA lied to Colin Powell and Larry Wilkerson, just as they did to Nancy Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller, Bob Graham, and everyone else who wasn't a card-carrying Neocon.
Why isn't the Corporate Media outraged at Bush's CIA and its overlord Dick Cheney, rather than Pelosi and all the other victims of their lies?
I have written many times in this space that I oppose any criminal prosecution of prior-administration officials on torture or other issues relating to the Iraq War and the war on terrorism, especially those CIA interrogators who relied in good faith on the instructions of policymakers and the legal opinions issued by Justice Department senior officials.
I have agreed with President Obama on the need to look forward, not backward.
But … I have changed my mind about the need to indict former Vice President Dick Cheney for complicity in illegal torture. .
His insistence on putting himself on multiple TV programs and conservative radio talk shows, not only defending torture but offering the defense that it worked, has changed my mind. Not only that — he went on to attack Mr. Obama as weakening the United States in the war on terrorism because Mr. Obama immediately announced that torture would no longer be allowed.
Dem's fighting words. They are also, in my view, reckless and irresponsible. They seem to be laying down a marker that in case, God forbid, there is a terrorist attack, Mr. Cheney can be the first to blame it on Mr. Obama's policies and say, "I told you so."
Even more, they seem to be an in-your-face dare by Mr. Cheney to the U.S. criminal justice system: "I am Dick Cheney, I approved violations of the law in the name of the war on terror, and what are you going to do about it?"
It reminds me of Gary Hart's reaction in the early days of his 1988 presidential campaign to the rumors of his womanizing. Mr. Hart denied the charge — and then dared the media to catch him. Well, they took him up on his dare (specifically, the Miami Herald did). And they caught him — at least in a compromising situation that led to his withdrawal from the campaign.
So as to Mr. Cheney: I think it is time to take him up on his implicit dare and indict him for violating the 1994 federal law against torture.
Not to do so, in light of Mr. Cheney's arrogant public challenges, may reinforce the notion that Mr. Cheney can get away with lawbreaking, and be proud of it, because he is a former vice president, and because he is the tough, intimidating Dick Cheney who everyone (at least many) in the Bush administration feared.
So I think it's important to take Mr. Cheney up on his challenge, despite all the disadvantages that had led me to oppose prosecutions of the former administration.
Here is what the indictment of Mr. Cheney would look like; it's not that complicated.
First, as to the law: The 1994 federal law making torture illegal defines torture as "any act that causes severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, intentionally inflicted on a person for such purpose as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession."
The two top officials at the Office of Legal Counsel — Jay S. Bybee (who is now a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) and John Yoo, now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley Law School — tried in 2002 to "reinterpret" the term "severe pain" out of existence by requiring a torture victim to feel pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
But their colleagues at Justice — not only at the OLC, but also the Criminal Division — repudiated their legal gymnastics and restated the definition of torture plainly set forth in the 1994 federal law and the Convention Against Torture. For this and other reasons, both Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee should at the very least be investigated for ethical violations and possible disbarment.
Second, as to the facts — here is what we know or have good reason to believe:
• We know that waterboarding was intentionally used against detainees to obtain information.
• We know that waterboarding causes "severe pain or suffering." It involves strapping a man to an inclined board with his head below his feet, wrapping a cloth across his face, and pouring water into his nostrils and mouth, which convinces the victim that he faces imminent death by drowning. It has been used as torture from the Inquisition to Nazi Germany, and was prosecuted as a war crime after World War II.
• Finally, there is strong circumstantial evidence that Mr. Cheney knew waterboarding was being used against detainees, that he expressly approved its use, or that he actually directed interrogators to use it. If any of these are true, then Mr. Cheney could be guilty under U.S. laws of being a co-conspirator or an accessory to a crime.
An indictment, of course, is only an accusation of criminal conduct. Mr. Cheney must be presumed innocent until a jury of his peers finds him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Many people still think, and I was among them until recently, that it would be better not to put the country through the divisive and backward-looking experience of seeing a former vice president on trial for crimes committed while in office. But given Mr. Cheney's decision to publicly attack the president on the subject, perhaps we have no choice but to take Mr. Cheney up on his challenge.
I am hoping that in the final analysis, the case of the People vs. Dick Cheney will provide all Americans with an opportunity to answer the vital question as to whether a democratic society based on moral values should defend the use of torture, even if at times it successfully obtains important information from a terrorist.
I am hoping our answer as a nation will be similar to the eloquent one provided by Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak regarding the use of torture by the Israeli Security Services:
"This is the destiny of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices employed by its enemies are open before it. Although a democracy must often fight with one hand tied behind its back, it nonetheless has the upper hand. Preserving the Rule of Law and recognition of an individual's liberty constitutes an important component in its understanding of security. At the end of the day, they strengthen its spirit and its strength and allow it to overcome its difficulties."
This goes way beyond strange bedfellows. But it looks like Dick Cheney has emerged as the single most forceful proponent of a full investigation of the Bush administration's torture policies.
In an interview on CBS's Face The Nation yesterday, the ex-veep claimed, as he has before, that the Obama administration's rejection of torture has made us less safe. But he also went further ever in repeatedly arguing -- contra congressional Republicans -- that we need to look back at the details of the torture program before moving forward.
When you get rid of enhanced interrogation techniques, for example, or the terrorist surveillance program, you reduce the intelligence flow to the intelligence community upon which we based those policies that were so successful.
So I think before they do that sort of thing, it's important to sit down and find out what did we learn?
Cheney also reminded Schieffer that last month he had requested that the National Archives release several CIA memos which, he has said, will show that torture was effective.
"Release the memos," he said yesterday. "And we can look and see for yourself what was produced." He continued: "If we're going to have this debate, it ought to be a complete debate, and those memos ought to be out there for people to look at and journalists like yourself to evaluate in terms of what we were able to accomplish with these policies."
Cheney even told Schieffer that he'd "talk to" congressional investigators about the program, adding: " I wouldn't be out here today if I didn't feel comfortable talking about what we're doing publicly."
Of course, the investigation Cheney appears to want to see would have a very different focus from the one that, say, Jonathan Turley is looking for. While torture opponents want a probe to look at exactly who ordered and approved the harsh techniques, with a view to possible prosecutions, the former VP instead seems to want concentrate on the question of torture's effectiveness -- and seems interested only in evidence that would bolster his case that has helped save lives.
Still, it's hard to look at either question without getting into the other. Which is why the clear consequence of Cheney's position is to lend support to those calling for a full accounting of what happened.
So how about this for a head-turning new slogan for torture opponents? "Listen To Dick Cheney: Investigate Torture."
Howie P.S.: Eugene Robinson and Liz Cheney discuss her father's arguments, video (14:36), and agree that on only one thing, more information should be released and examined. Liz is as resolute (stubborn) as her father. Andrea Mitchell follows their debate and attempts to sort out the facts.
Dick Cheney said Sunday the Bush torture program was "the right thing to do." He's wrong - and we need to push back. Watch the video and then sign the petition to the Attorney General, asking for an investigation into the torture program.
There’s a big piece of news about Dick Cheney and torture buried toward the end of this big Washington Post piece about the torture wars.
Specifically: The White House has decided to declassify and release a classified 2004 CIA report about the torture program that is reported to have found no proof that torture foiled any terror plots on American soil — directly contradicting Cheney’s claims. The paper cites “allies” of the White House as a source.
Dem Congressional staffers tell me this report is the “holy grail,” because it is expected to detail torture in unprecedented detail and to cast doubt on the claim that torture works — and its release will almost certainly trigger howls of protest from conservatives. Tellingly, neither the CIA nor the White House knocked down the story in response to my questions, with spokespeople for both declining comment. Here’s the key nugget from the Post piece:
Government officials familiar with the CIA’s early interrogations say the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses is contained in the “top secret” May 7, 2004, inspector general report, based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents. The full report remains closely held, although White House officials have told political allies that they intend to declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month’s release of the Justice Department’s interrogation memos…
Although some useful information was produced, the report concluded that “it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks,” according to the Justice Department’s declassified summary of it.
MSNBC-ED Show, video (12:44). Howie P.S.: Lawrence O'Donnell gets hot under the collar discussing the rationale for torture with its defenders. Gregg Levine has more about one of the defenders, David Rivkin.
Howie P.S.: John Dean visits Keith Olbermann and contrasts how the Bush defenders are operating and how the Nixon defenders handled the Watergate affair.
The US justice department is likely to recommend a criminal probe into Bush administration lawyers who provided the legal basis for torturing detainees, a law expert has told Al Jazeera.
US media reports said on Tuesday that a justice department internal ethics office had completed a report on the lawyers but did not mention the possibility of criminal charges.
But Scott Horton, a professor of military law at Colombia University in New York, said the results of the inquiry would very likely form the basis "for a criminal investigation being commenced".
"There is likely to be a criminal investigation that will look at the entire process of introducing torture in Guantanamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib and other places as a result of decisions that we now know were ultimately taken in the White House itself," he said.
"These lawyers played a key role in that entire process."
Horton added that the report would "heighten the pressure on the attorney-general [Eric Holder] for the appointment of a special prosecutor" to investigate the lawyers' actions.
"I think the attorney-general is going to find it impossible to avoid the investigation phase," he said.
The lawyers wrote a series of memos during the presidency of George Bush approving torture techniques during interrogations, including the waterboarding method that causes detainees to feel like they are drowning.
Barack Obama, Bush's successor, declassified and made public the memos last month and announced that CIA interrogators who followed advice outlined in the memos would not be prosecuted.
The issue has sparked intense debate in Washington, with some criticising Obama for releasing the memos and others saying he should take the matter further by prosecuting those behind the policy.
Pressure on Obama
Asked if the report put additional pressure on the Obama administration to take legal action against the lawyers behind the memos, Horton said it did.
"Manfred Novak [the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture] is correct in that the [UN] Convention Against Torture is very clear cut on this issue ... it requires a criminal investigation, that's the next stage here."The 220-page report by the Office of Professional Responsibility, which examines possible ethics violations by employees, concluded that some of the lawyers behind the memos should face disciplinary action, according to the New York Times.
But the paper said the report indicated that the lawyers would not be criminally prosecuted.
Citing government officials briefed on a draft of the findings, the paper said the report was not final and had not yet been approved by Holder.
Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury worked in the justice department's Office of Legal Counsel and played major roles in crafting the legal justification for interrogation techniques many, including Obama, have called torture.
Investigators recommended professional sanctions against Bybee and Yoo, but not Bradbury, said the Associated Press, citing a person familiar with the matter.
The most severe possible professional sanction would be disbarment
In a letter on Monday to senators who had pressed the justice department for information on the investigation, Ronald Weich, the assistant attorney-general, said the former employees had been given until May 4 to respond to the draft report.
Now that the deadline has passed, officials are likely to make revisions to the report based on the responses received and decide how much, if any, of the findings should be made public.
Howie P.S.: Jonathan Turley, another law professor, weighs in on The ED Show, video (04:13).
Howie P.S.: Rep. Jerome Nadler, Ryan Lizza, Michael Medved and Kiki McLean discuss what should be the government's response to the torture memos and the Bush administration's abuse of power. When Medved describes the authors of the Bush administration legal memos justifying torture as "the finest legal minds," Schultz just laughs off his description.
During a meeting with bloggers from Connecticut, Senator Chris Dodd offers his thoughts on the Bush administration torture memos.
Howie P.S.: Dodd's father was a prosecutor at Nuremburg, so he offers some historical context. And how is it that such a busy U.S. Senator finds the time to meet with bloggers, unlike our homegrown varieties?
Barack Obama
