torture nation...
The invaluble Dan Froomkin
President Bush says he was aware that his top aides met in the White House basement to micromanage the application of waterboarding and other widely-condemned interrogation techniques. And he says it was no big deal.
[snip]
It's true that it has been widely assumed and occasionally reported that the CIA's use of brutal interrogation techniques could be traced back to the White House on a general level. But it was most definitely new last week when ABC News reported that a group of Bush's top aides, including Vice President Cheney, took part in meetings where they explicitly discussed and approved -- literally blow by blow -- tactics such as waterboarding. And while Bush has previously defended these tactics -- vaguely, and insisting against all evidence that they did not amount to torture -- he had not, until now, acknowledged that he personally OK'd them beforehand.
If you consider what the government did to be torture, which is a crime according to U.S. and international law, Bush's statement shifts his role from being an accessory after the fact to being part of a conspiracy to commit.
Will Bunch asks Barack Obama whether his administration would seek to prosecute Bush administration officials on the revelations that they greenlighted torture and other potential crimes that took plasce in the White House.
The bottom line is that: Obama sent a clear signal that -- unlike impeachment, which he's ruled out and which now seems a practical impossibility -- he is at the least open to the possibility of investigating potential high crimes in the Bush White House. To many, the information that waterboarding -- which the United States has considered torture and a violation of law in the past -- was openly planned out in the seat of American government is evidence enough to at least start asking some tough questions in January 2009.
Michael Collins: Zubaydah, Bush and the Bureaucracy of Torture
Joel Pett Lexington Herald-Leader Apr 15, 2008 |
Please join the ACLU and Crooks and Liars in demanding an Independent Council to investigate this Adminitration's approval of torture and abuse.
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