New Secret Torture Memos;

  
Nationwide Protest on October 27th!

By Hank Edson  

Just as they say that the one thing that never changes is change itself, the one thing we have learned about the Bush administration is that we always have more to learn.

Today, The New York Times has published an important article by Scott Shane, David Johnston and James Risen detailing the Bush administration’s still active pursuit of the right to torture, now three years after the passage of the McCain Detainee Treatment Act, which was intended to outlaw what was already twice illegal: torture under the Geneva Conventions ratified by the United States in 1955 and also under the the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996.

Some of the story has entered into the public lexicon, “the torture memo,” “Abu Ghraib,” and “waterboarding” are now sadly common usage in American English, a fact that makes me want to resort to the Oxford Dictionary of Cursing to find appropriate descriptors of our president and vice president.

Paired down to the bare essentials, here is the sequence of events laid out in The New York Times article.

On September 16, 2001, Vice President Cheney told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that the U.S. would “ have to work, though, sort of the dark side” and that “a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies…it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

Not long after, the United States began using extreme techniques unsupervised by the American Red Cross, which according to The New York Times, included “ slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.”

In August 2002, following increasingly urgent and frequent inquiries by troubled interrogators wondering if they were “crossing the line” legally in applying the techniques they were being instructed to apply, an up-and-coming Conservative lawyer in the Justice Department named John Yoo authored what has now become infamous as “the torture memo.” The memo said that no interrogation technique was illegal unless it produced pain equal to that caused by organ failure or “even death.”

A second memo authored in the same timeframe detailed what techniques could be used, how often they could be applied and for how long.

In the fall of 2003, Yoo left the Justice Department and the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, began to reassess Yoo’s work. Goldsmith concluded that Yoo’s advice was deeply flawed and in August 2004, he officially withdrew Yoo’s memo. Goldsmith left the Office of Legal Counsel soon afterwards.

A half year later, the Justice Department posted a new memo on its website, which seemed to indicate that the Bush Administration was reversing its policy, stating: “Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms.” The White House then publicized this opinion in an effort to facilitate the confirmation of its nominee for Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales.

Upon taking over as Attorney General, Gonzales chose Steven G. Bradbury to serve as Goldsmith’s replacement as head of the Office of Legal Counsel. First, however, he was to be subjected to a probationary period. Critics argued the probationary period placed pressure on Bradbury to prove his loyalty to the Bush administration above his loyalty to the law.

In February 2005, while on probation, Bradbury signed the secret torture memo we haven’t heard about before. The New York Times describes the memo as “an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency” and specifically authorized the use of combinations of “ painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.” Waterboarding, more specifically, is the pouring of water over a bound prisoner’s cloth-covered face to induce fear of suffocation.

Gonzales approved the Bradbury memo over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general who had famously confronted Gonzales in his capacity as White House Counsel at the hospital bedside of John Ashcroft. Gonzales was attempting to use Ashcroft’s weakened condition to obtain re-authorization of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program. Because Ashcroft has transferred the attorney general’s power to Comey, however, the ploy failed.

In June 2005, President Bush rewarded Bradbury’s loyalty by officially nominating him to be the new head of the Office of Legal Counsel.

When soon after Senators Richard Dubin and John McCain proposed legislation prohibiting “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” of detainees, Mr. Bradbury was asked to determine whether the proposed law would make any of the CIA’s interrogation methods illegal. The Justice Department had never before evaluated the legality of the CIA’s interrogation methods.

The New York Times writes: “ In the end, Mr. Bradbury’s opinion delivered what the White House wanted: a statement that the standard imposed by Mr. McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act would not force any change in the C.I.A.’s practices, according to officials familiar with the memo. Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that ‘shocks the conscience’ was unconstitutional, the opinion found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said.”

The Times reports that, according to unnamed officials, both of Bradbury’s two 2005 legal opinions on interrogation techniques “remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums.” Thus, the Bush administration remains secretly committed to an authoritarian use of torture, violence, and brute force in its reign of terror. Thus, the Bush administration remains committed to avoiding any and all measures of oversight and to defying the dictates of the American political process and of both international and domestic law.

This outrageous and shameful conduct is just one more reason we cannot afford to continue the war in Iraq. Every day that we allow the war to continue is one more day we authorize our President and Vice President to continue to use torture to further their sick pursuit of “peace” through domination and “moral superiority” through theft of natural resources and territorial rights.

This outrageous and shameful conduct is just one more reason we cannot afford NOT to impeach Bush and Cheney. And it is also one more reason we can no longer leave our fate in the hands of an unprincipled and incompetent Democratic congress.

The people must begin to exercise their power. We must begin to show our strength. We must speak out, walk out, stand out, shout out, and vote out. On October 27, 2007, there will be mass protests in 11 cities across the nation ( Boston, Chicago, Jonesborough, Tenn., Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, San Francisco and Seattle) and other communities are encouraged to create their own demonstrations as well. This is an incredibly important day for all of us to live up to our civic responsibility. We all need to make room in our lives to challenge the great and terrible abuses of power committed by the Bush administration in our name. Come out to the protest and set your shoulder against the inertia of our corrupt political process. Who knows but one more person just might set the entire edifice in motion. In San Francisco, I’ll be holding the sign, “VOTE FOR SHEEHAN!” I hope I’ll see you there!

Copyright © Hank Edson 2007

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