Think Progress:

This morning, the House Judiciary Committee voted to subpoena David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, to compel him to testify about the administration’s interrogation programs. He has said he will agree to testify if subpoenaed. The AP also reports that John Yoo, author of legal memos that sanctioned torture, has reversed course and agreed last night to testify before the committee as well, along with Douglas Feith and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Former CIA Director George Tenet “is still in negotiations with the committee, according to House Judiciary Committee spokeswoman Melanie Roussell.”

Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Addington, Haynes, Feith, Bybee, Yoo Behind Widespread Use of Torture

By Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian:

Update: Audio|Philippe Sands Interview

The US’s most senior general was “hoodwinked” by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques for terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, the Guardian can reveal.

The development led to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners.

General Richard Myers, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff from 2001 to 2005, wrongly believed that inmates at Guantánamo and other prisons were protected by the Geneva conventions and from abuse tantamount to torture. (doh!)

The way he was duped by senior officials in Washington - who believed the Geneva conventions and other traditional safeguards were out of date - is disclosed in a devastating account of their role, extracts from which will be published in tomorrow’s Guardian.

In his new book, Torture Team, Philippe Sands QC, a professor of law at University College London, reveals:

Senior figures in the Bush administration pushed through previously outlawed measures with the help of unqualified and inexperienced military officials at Guantánamo.

Myers believes he was a victim of “intrigue” by top lawyers at the department of justice, the office of the vice president, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld’s defence department.

Myers wrongly believed interrogation techniques had been taken from the army’s field manual.

The lawyers who pushed through the interrogation techniques - all of them political appointees - were Alberto Gonzales, David Addingon and William Haynes.

Others involved were Doug Feith, Rumsfeld’s undersecretary for policy, and Jay Bybee and John Yoo, two assistant attorney generals.

The revelations have already sparked a fierce response in the US from those familiar with the contents of the book.

They are determined to establish accountability for the way the Bush administration violated international and domestic law by sanctioning prisoner abuse and torture.

The Bush administration has tried to explain away the ill-treatment of detainees at Guantánamo and the Abu Ghraib prison, in Baghdad, by blaming junior officials.

Sands establishes that pressure for the aggressive and cruel treatment of detainees came from the very top and was sanctioned by the most senior lawyers.

Myers, the most senior military officer of the most powerful country in the world, was one top official who did not understand the implications of what was being done.

Sands, who spent three hours with the former general, describes him as being “confused” about the decisions that were taken.

Myers did not realise that fundamental safeguards provided by the Geneva conventions and elsewhere were being abandoned by his own junior officers as well as political appointees in the administration, the author says.

He believed new techniques recommended by Haynes and authorised for use by the military at Guantánamo by Rumsfeld in December 2002 had been taken from the US army field manual.

However, none of the severe interrogation techniques came from the manual, and all breached established US military guidelines and rules.
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Raw Story:

This week’s revelation of another secret Bush administration memo that seemed to eliminate any boundaries on the treatment of detainees added to the already substantial evidence that US military and intelligence interrogators have abused and perhaps even tortured prisoners rounded up during the “war on terror.”Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo wrote in 2003 that Bush’s seemingly supreme authority in wartime trumped federal laws “prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes,” as the Washington Post reported. For constitutional lawyer Jonathan Turley, the latest memo should be more than enough reason for Congress to begin some serious investigations, but hesitance to really dig into Bush-authorized “war crimes” have precluded them from doing so, he says.

“It is really amazing because Congress — including the Democrats — have avoided any type of investigation into torture because they do not want to deal with the fact that the president ordered war crimes,” Turley told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann Thursday night. “But evidence keeps on coming out…. What you get from this is this was a premeditated and carefully orchestrated torture program. Not torture, but a torture program.”

Gitmo commander ’sick of’ torture talk

All this talk about detainee mistreatment and torture has the current commander of US forces at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, fed up. Brig. Gen. Gregory J. Zanetti told American Legion members this week that the mission of Gitmo guards is “misunderstood” and called the secluded prison, purposefully established off of US soil, “the most transparent detention facility in the world.”

“Quit talking to me about abuse and torture,” he said. “Frankly, I’m sick of it.”

Zanetti must be hearing quite a lot of complaints, or have a rather short fuse, to grow sick of torture lamentations so quickly. He’s been commanding forces at Guantanamo for just two months (since Feb. 4).

Detainees rounded up as part of the War on Terror, launched just after 9/11, began arriving in Guantanamo Bay in January of 2002. Documents obtained last year by the American Civil Liberties Union “describe prisoners shackled in excruciating ’stress positions,’ held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months.”

Zanetti told BlogTalkRadio that the only abuse he witnessed is “detainee on the guards.”

Regarding “the charges of mistreatment, abuse, torture,” he said, “I’ll just say this. On my watch, I haven’t seen anything like that, nor would I stand for it. And we’re not going to allow that.”

Gitmo tactics partly inspired Yoo memo

So while two of the last 64 months Guantanamo has been operating may have been torture-free, the Post notes that Yoo’s recently disclosed memo was drafted at least in partly in response to techniques that had been used at the notorious prison camp.

Yoo’s 2003 memo arrived amid strong Pentagon debate about which interrogation techniques should be allowed and which might lead to legal action in domestic and international courts. After a rebellion by military lawyers, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 suspended a list of aggressive techniques he had approved, the most extreme of which were used on a single detainee at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The prisoner, military investigators later would determine, was subjected to stress positions, nudity, hooding, exposure to dogs and other aggressive techniques. Largely because of Yoo’s memo, however, a Pentagon working group in April 2003 endorsed the continued use of extremely aggressive tactics. The top lawyers for each military service, who were largely excluded from the group, did not receive a final copy of Yoo’s March memo and did not know about the group’s final report for more than a year, officials said.

Turley said the memo had little basis in accepted legal theory and was little more than thinly veiled “spin” to cover for the president to do whatever he wants.

“The president and his aides were very, very careful to go to the lawyers first so they could make a claim they were acting under some assumption of actual authority,” he said. “There really is none.”

This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast April 3, 2008.

Update II: Firedoglake has analysis

Update: Washington Post Cover Story

The Guardian UK

The US justice department extended the sweeping wartime powers claimed by George Bush to military interrogators, giving them freedom from criminal laws when questioning al-Qaida suspects, in a 2003 legal memorandum released for the first time yesterday.

The brief, provided to the Pentagon days before the invasion of Iraq, allowed the slapping, poking, and shoving of detainees without legal consequences.

Maiming a detainee - defined as disabling or cutting out the nose, eye, ear, lip, tongue, or limb - was also deemed a defensible interrogation tactic if the military could prove it had no advance intention to maim.

The terrorist attacks of 2001 allowed the White House and the military to invoke a broad right to self-defence, the brief argued.

“The defendant could claim that he was fulfilling the executive branch’s authority to protect the federal government and the nation from attack after the events of September 11, which triggered the nation’s right to self-defence,” read the brief, written by former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo.

While the memorandum was revoked nine months after it was sent, the Bush administration has built on its arguments to assert exemptions from US and international law during interrogations conducted at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere overseas.

Often referring to the president as “the sovereign”, Yoo gave Bush the legal right to override international laws “at his discretion”.
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From David Swanson:

Monday evening, March 17, 2008, 8:00 - 9:00 p.m. ET.

My guest will be retired General and former Director of the National Security Agency William Odom. We’ll be discussing the occupation of Iraq, now entering its sixth year, and other abuses of power including warantless wiretapping. Listen in at http://www.thepeoplespeakradio.net

Phone in with your questions toll-free from the U.S. and Canada at 888-228-4494, and from the rest of the world at 877-489-6350.

By Sherwood Ross

It’s hard to believe, but the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., just ruled three Muslim British humanitarian workers and a religious pilgrim captured in Afghanistan and detained in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison, were non-persons and, therefore, torturing them was legal!

A law suit brought by the four Muslims, (since freed and repatriated to England,) was tossed out January 11th by the D.C. court, a big victory for 11 present and former Pentagon officials, including ex-Defense boss Donald Rumsfeld. The dismissal occurred on the sixth anniversary of the opening of “Gitmo”, which today houses 275 inmates, down from its peak of 800 — not one of whom has had a trial in a U.S. Federal court.

In a display of arrogance of the sort that is coming to typify this “worst generation” of Americans under President George Bush, the Appeals Court held the Pentagon can do as it pleases to aliens held outside U.S. borders. They have no rights. To her credit, dissenting judge Janice Rogers Brown said the decision “leaves us with the unfortunate and quite dubious distinction of being the only court to declare those held at Guantanamo are not ‘person(s).”
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On 11th January 2008 former Guantanamo detainees will gather outside 10 Downing Street at 11:30 am to deliver a letter calling for the closure of the base and the release of British residents Binyam Mohammed Al Habashi and Ahmed Bel Bacha. Attending the event will be Moazzam Begg, Martin Mubanga, Bisher Al Rawi and MEP Jean Lambert.

The letter, addressed to Prime Minister Gordon Brown, has been signed by a number of dignitaries including Baroness Helena Kennedy, Baroness Sarah Ludford, Lord Nazir Ahmed, Sir Geoffrey Bindman and many others, ranging across all parts of British society.

The 6th year of detentions in Guantanamo Bay has brought renewed calls by human rights organisations and former Guantanamo detainees for its closure and fair trials/repatriation of those unlawfully detained.

Moazzam Begg, former Guantanamo Bay detainee and spokesman for Cageprisoners commented,

“Entering its seventh year, the internment of hundreds of men in Guantanamo Bay - without charge or trial – continues to be amongst the most visibly repugnant and persistently embarrassing episodes of the US-led ‘War on Terror’. Last year, even former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell declared, ‘…if it were up to me I would close Guantanamo not tomorrow but this afternoon …’ The intervention by the present UK administration in securing the return of four British residents last year is most welcome. But a similar assertion to that of Mr. Powell’s by the British government is now highly overdue.”

The 6th Anniversary will be marked with a whole day of actions organised by the London Guantanamo Campaign in conjunction with Cageprisoners. The evening will bring a demonstration between 6-8 pm in Parliament Square where former detainees, politicians and celebrities will be addressing the public. The day however will be filled with ‘statues’ action in different areas of London. The human statues will be dressed in orange jumpsuits and will stand in different locations to symbolise different aspects of the War on Terror. Further details can be found here

A copy of the letter to Gordon Brown is available here

Cageprisoners is a human rights organisation that exists to raise awareness of the plight of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other detainees held as part of the War on Terror. We aim to give a voice to the voiceless.

A full transcript of Jonathan Turley’s appearance on Countdown is available here.
This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast on January 2, 2008.

It was announced on Wednesday that the Justice Department has opened an official criminal investigation into the destruction of CIA torture tapes. However, rather than appointing an outside special council, Attorney General Mukasey has assigned an assistant US Attorney from Connecticut to handle the proceedings.At the same time, the chairman and co-chair of the 9/11 Commission are charging in a New York Times op-ed that the CIA obstructed their own investigations in 2003-04 by not disclosing the existence of the tapes.

Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley told Keith Olbermann that as many as six criminal offenses could be involved in the 9/11 Commission charge alone, including obstruction of Congress, obstruction of justice, perjury, and conspiracy.

However, Turley emphasized that the real crime under investigation is not merely obstruction, but the actual torture documented by the tapes. “It is still, even after the last seven year, a crime to torture suspects,” Turley commented.

Turley suggested that under those circumstances, the failure to appoint a special prosecutor was a serious problem, because “the investigation will essentially be the Justice Department investigating itself. … Picking some guy in Connecticut or Cincinnati or Delaware or any other state doesn’t make any difference. His boss is Michael Mukasey. And Michael Mukasey’s boss is the president of the United States. If torture occurred, he was the guy who ordered it.”

Turley suggested that there is a reluctance throughout official Washington, not “just Republicans,” to pry into an underlying crime which is potentially far more serious than the burglary which was the start of Watergate. When Olberman asked if the investigation “could still lead to criminal culpability for the president,” Turley replied, “Most certainly it can. That original crime could only have been ordered by the president and it leads directly to his office.”

Turley finally expressed a concern that the Justice Department might try to “narrow this, define it in a way to avoid torture.” He explained, “Nobody in this town wants to talk about it because they know that there’s a lot of people in the country that like the idea of torturing these people. And that’s just a painful fact. But it’s also a painful fact that it’s a crime. And when the president says that we got some useful evidence, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it’s immaterial. Just because it had good results or good motivations, it remains a crime.”

Former 9/11 Commission Co-Chairman Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton write in The New York Times today that the CIA “obstructed our investigation” when it destroyed interrogation videotapes and “failed to respond to our lawful requests” about “the kind of information that would have been contained in such videotapes.”

According to the Washington Times, President Bush “is benefiting from a Karl Rove-free White House and the lower-profile approach of his successor,” Barry Jackson, who is now “the right fit for a president now reliant on Republican legislators sticking with him.”

After enjoying “a good rest” at his Crawford, TX ranch, President Bush returns to Washington with an “ambitious agenda for 2008,” which includes “tackling the mortgage lending crisis,” “securing more money from Congress for Iraq,” and pushing Congress to “permanently revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.”

In “the most brazen and deadly attack” that Baghdad has seen in months, 36 people were killed and 32 were wounded by a suicide bomber who “targeted a funeral procession for a victim of another bombing.” There has been “a slight rise in suicide car and vest bombs” in Iraq since October.

“An outspoken Saudi blogger is being held for ‘purposes of interrogation,’ the Saudi Interior Ministry confirmed Tuesday.” Fouah al-Farhan, whose blog “discusses social issues,” wrote in a letter to friends before he was arrested that he is being targeted because of his writings on “political prisoners here in Saudi Arabia.” expand post »