Jeanne has the outline of what we know so far:

January 25, 2002: Alberto Gonzales, the White House's top lawyer, explained in a memo that one advantage of not applying the Geneva Conventions' protections to al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in U.S. custody was reducing the possibility that administration officials could be tried domestically for war crimes.

August, 2002: The Justice Department advised the White House that torturing Al Qaeda suspects may be justified, that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations," and that self-defense and necessity would "provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability" later. (John Ashcroft refused today to either release or discuss the memo, and was warned that he was risking a contempt citation from Congress.)

March 6, 2003: The same legal reasoning showed up in a Pentagon report, prepared for Donald Rumsfeld, dealing with interrogation techniques at Guantanamo. In the Pentagon's CYA explanation, as reported in the NYT today, the report was not a legal analysis, and the legal rationale came from the Justice Department and the White House counsel's office. (Lynndie England was apparently unavailable for blame on this one.) I'm not sure where and how the Justice Department memo fits in, but before you buy the buck passing, you should read Phil Carter, who sees DoD memo as being of a whole different order from, say, the Gonzales memo, which seems to focus on how to stay (barely) within the law rather than how to break it and avoid prosecution.

[UPDATE: After reading the 56-page Pentagon Memo, Michael Froomkin notes that it refers back not to the March 6 Justice Department torture memo, but to an earlier one, dated January 22 -- three days before the Gonzales Memo -- and titled Re: Application of Treaties and Laws to al-Queda and Taliban Detainees. That makes two Justice Department memo's that as far as I know are unavailable.]

A link dump of the torture story. Memo Offered Justification for Use of Torture

In August 2002, the Justice Department advised the White House that torturing al Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad "may be justified," and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted in President Bush's war on terrorism, according to a newly obtained memo.

If a government employee were to torture a suspect in captivity, "he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the Al Qaeda terrorist network," said the memo, from the Justice Department's office of legal counsel, written in response to a CIA request for legal guidance. It added that arguments centering on "necessity and self-defense could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability" later.

The memo seems to counter the pre-Sept. 11, 2001, assumption that U.S. government personnel would never be permitted to torture captives. It was offered after the CIA began detaining and interrogating suspected al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the wake of the attacks, according to government officials familiar with the document.

The legal reasoning in the 2002 memo, which covered treatment of al Qaeda detainees in CIA custody, was later used in a March 2003 report by Pentagon lawyers assessing interrogation rules governing the Defense Department's detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At that time, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had asked the lawyers to examine the logistical, policy and legal issues associated with interrogation techniques.

I is the State, Baby...

Oy vay. The Wall Street Journal reports that yet another high level Pentagon "legal memo" has emerged, not merely "authorizing" torture, but outlining how participants in torture (up to, including, and maybe ESPECIALLY) fatal torture, can... get away with it, as part of the President's "inherent authority" to be a dictator.

The relativistic declaration of human rights

I'm reasonably amazed that apparently intelligent people are still making lame arguments trying to defend the Bush administration and their attempts to officially reintroduce torture into the reportoire of acceptable military behaviour.

The interest in torture went straight to the top

The White House couldn't link Hussein with Al Qaeda, but We the People can link Abu Ghraib with the White House, starting at least as early as September 2003:

The head of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of the information being collected from prisoners there had been requested by "White House staff," according to an account of his statement obtained by The Washington Post.

ugh

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved interrogation methods for Guantanamo Bay detainees including the use of "stress positions" for up to four hours, "fear of dogs" and "mild non-injurious" physical contact, a newspaper reports.

The Wall Street Journal reports Rumsfeld approved the tactics in December 2002. When military lawyers complained about the tactics being used, officials re-examined the techniques and implemented new rules in an April 2003 memo.

Whiskey Bar: Praise the Lord and Pass the Thumbscrews

It's been pointed out to me (tip of the hat to Bernhard H.) that the team of lawyers who wrote the Pentagon's treatise on presidential torture powers was led by this woman:
U.S. Air Force's General Counsel, Mary L. Walker, discusses what it takes to leave a legacy of significance

Ms. Walker, it turns out, is a long-time Republican political appointee first brought to Washington during the Reagan administration to help oversee the looting of America's natural resources, um, that is, I mean, to serve as principal deputy in the environmental division at Ed Meese's Justice Department.

It also appears that Ms. Walker is a devout Christian - much like her fellow Reagan alum and environmental despoiler, Interior Secretary James "I don't know how many generations we've got until the Lord returns" Watt. And she's the co-founder of a San Diego group called Professional Women's Fellowship, an offshoot of the Campus Crusade for Christ "dedicated to helping professionals find balance, focus and direction in life."

There's Something About Mary

It's been pointed out to me that the interview with Mary L. Walker - the Air Force's General Counsel and squadron leader for the team of lawyers that drew up the Pentagon's torture memo - has been pulled from the web site of the Professional Women's Fellowship.

I'm not surprised, since many of the comments recently left there (none of them by Whiskey Bar readers, I hope) were definitely, well, unchristian. Not to mention revolting.

However, the Internet being what it is, you can still find copies of Ms. Walker's comments elsewhere, like in the Google cache, or on this site. And, just to be doubly certain, I've attached a text version to the bottom of this post.

Relearning Old Skills

The CIA's track record of involvement in torture - as an instructor, funder, contractor and beneficiary, if not an actual participant in the dirty deed itself - is reasonably well documented. And yet for decades U.S. government officials have denied it, or at least tried to obfuscate the issue, even when speaking off the record.

No longer. In the Washington Post's follow up to yesterday's story on the Justice Department's torture memo - the bureaucratic Big Brother (pun intended) of the Pentagon's torture memo - we're quite casually told this:

A former senior administration official said the CIA "was prepared to get more aggressive and re-learn old skills, but only with explicit assurances from the top that they were doing so with the full legal authority the president could confer on them." (emphasis added)

So it seems we can consider the administration's conduct of the war on terrorism as an exercise in vocational rehabilitation.

Joe Ryan: The Lost Weeks

Back in April, I posted some extracts from the web diary of Abu Ghraib prison interrogator Joe Ryan, which was hosted by a conservative talk radio station in Minneapolis - where Joe was a sometime on-air personality - until the heat generated by the torture scandal prompted station management to flush his writings down the memory hole.

But then the plumbing backed up. Alert reader Bernhard H. (who also spotted Pentagon torture attorney Mary Walker's unintentionally ironic on-line interview) discovered a few weeks worth of entries in the Google cache for Joe's old page.

Well, via Talk Left, I see that UK Indymedia has found a few more weeks worth of Joe's entries on the Alexa search engine cache. And just in case they disappear again, UK Indymedia has also posted them in PDF form.

Ashcroft

You have to admit, the solution is elegant: Once specific forms of brutality are deemed, through pure sophistry, not to meet the legal definition of torture as set down by Congress and the courts, the rest of the cover up flows naturally. Ashcroft can say, with a perfectly straight face:
[The president] has made no order that would require or direct the violation of any law of the United States enacted by the Congress, or any treaty to which the United States is a party as ratified by the Congress, or the Constitution of the United States.

The only way to challenge that statement would be to examine both the directives and the legal guidance they were based upon, and force the administration to explain why conduct which the International Red Cross has condemned as "tantamount to torture" is not, in fact, "torture" as defined under U.S. law and the International Convention Against Torture. Which is also why Ashcroft must avoid admitting the existence of the directives and refuse to release the memos officially.

Saudi Graduate Student Acquitted of Six Charges Under US Patriot Act

Saudi graduate student Sami Omar al-Hussayen, who has been charged under the U.S. Patriot Act with using his computer to further terrorism, has been acquitted on six of 14 charges against him.

The jury reached the decision of Thursday after seven days of deliberation in a court in Idaho. They deadlocked on the eight other charges.

Three of the six not-guilty verdicts were on terrorism counts, two involved visa fraud and one involved making a false statement.

Use of Dogs to Scare Prisoners Was Authorized

U.S. intelligence personnel ordered military dog handlers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to use unmuzzled dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees during interrogations late last year, a plan approved by the highest-ranking military intelligence officer at the facility, according to sworn statements the handlers provided to military investigators.

A military intelligence interrogator also told investigators that two dog handlers at Abu Ghraib were "having a contest" to see how many detainees they could make involuntarily urinate out of fear of the dogs, according to the previously undisclosed statements obtained by The Washington Post.

The statements by the dog handlers provide the clearest indication yet that military intelligence personnel were deeply involved in tactics later deemed by a U.S. Army general to be "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses."

President Bush and top Pentagon officials have said the criminal abuse at Abu Ghraib was confined to a small group of rogue military police soldiers who stripped detainees naked, beat them and photographed them in humiliating sexual poses. An Army investigation into the abuse condemned the MPs for those practices, but also included the use of unmuzzled dogs to frighten detainees among the "intentional abuse."

So far, the only charges to emerge have been against seven MPs and do not include any dog incidents, even though such use of dogs is an apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Army's field manual. The military intelligence officer in charge of Abu Ghraib later told investigators that the use of unmuzzled dogs in interrogation sessions was recommended by a two-star general and that it was "okay."

Lawyers raised concerns on interrogations

Military attorneys working for the Pentagon's top general raised concerns early in 2003 that interrogation guidelines approved for use at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, could put their boss in legal jeopardy if prisoners there were abused, three Defense Department officials say.

Staff lawyers for Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined a group of the Pentagon's top uniformed legal officers in questioning tougher interrogation methods for prisoners at Guantanamo that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld eventually authorized in April 2003.

The concerns expressed by Myers' attorneys demonstrate that worries about the potential criminal mistreatment of U.S.-held prisoners rose to the highest levels of the military several months before abuses occurred at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in the fall of 2003.

U.S. denies torture at Guantanamo

[a big squishy softball from Rev. Moon's UPI] U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized at least four exceptions to interrogation techniques on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the New York Times said.

Pentagon officials scrambled to downplay the leaked secret report on the government's rights with respect to the legality of questioning methods, first reported by the Wall Street Journal Monday.

"The April document was about interrogation techniques and procedures," said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman. "It was not a legal analysis."

Di Rita said the 24 interrogation procedures permitted at Guantanamo, four of which required Rumsfeld's explicit approval, did not constitute torture and were consistent with international treaties.

U.S. Frees Hundreds From Abu Ghraib

The U.S. military freed more than 600 detainees Friday from Abu Ghraib prison, the largest release since officials announced their intention to cut the population in half and send people home to their families.

Hundreds of Iraqis packed the shoulder of the highway outside the prison, waiting for relatives and loved ones to emerge from behind the barbed wire and thick stone walls. Mothers and wives clutched the pictures and identification numbers of their detained sons and husbands, hoping that they would match those on a list of prisoners to be released.

"My husband is not a criminal and he is still here," said Rajaa Abdullah, 53, whose husband's number was on the list. "Where is justice? Where is the freedom that Bush claims he brought to the Iraqis?"

Heifa Naser, 50, Abdullah's sister-in-law who had waited in vain for the number of her husband, interrupted with tears and a choked voice. "We hate them," she said. "If I can, I'll kill them by myself, but I know I can't. We have only tears, and that's all. We like the American people, but the problem is their government. They are just like us, without any power. We saw them carrying banners and having demonstrations against the war." [As a participant in the only US foreign relations initiative of the Bush years that hasn't been an utterly predictable disaster, the rest of you folks are entirely welcome. Aren't you glad we were shrill enough for them to hear us all the way over in Iraq?]

Torture and Rumors of Torture

[Sy Hersh] said the people most horrified by the way the war was planned were the military commanders responsible for protecting their troops.... He talked about the horror of the 1000 civilian deaths in Fallujah (but was careful to note the Marines were doing their job, placing the blame with their superiors)....

He talked about how hard it is to get the truth out in Republican Washington: "If you agree with the neocons you're a genius. If you disagree you're a traitor." Bush, he said, was closing ranks, purging anyone who wasn't 100% with him. Said Tenet has a child in bad health, has heart problems, and seemed to find him generally a decent guy under unimaginable pressure, and that people told him that Tenet feared a heart attack if he had to take one more grilling from Cheney. "When these guys memoirs come out, it will shock all of us."...

He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said, "horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."

He looked frightened.

the DOD memo

Which is to say that if torture is used, Dubya should authorize it explicitly, since activities he chooses to authorize are above the law. But relax, folks -- they surely don't mean to authorize anything; in practice, this will surely be limited to the activities of Republicans. The memo is also noteworthy for its invocation of the Nuremberg "just following orders" defense (so called, as Billmon notes, because it was rejected at Nuremberg).

But beyond the individual howlers (though should one really look beyond an assertion that Dubya is allowed to authorize anything?) is the general tone, described in Phil Carter's much-quoted analysis that Dubya's administration is less focused on doing the right thing than on getting away with the wrong thing. How did we arrive at standards of conduct where this is considered proper?

Posts on the torture memo and its implications

When you get to the point that the administration clears the path for sanctioned torture, they are not operating under the U.S. Constitution and are in direct violation of the values we are supposed to believe in as a nation. I strongly believe that these laws and values can -- and often have -- be used for tremendous good, and so I cannot support pretenders to government who active pervert or ignore them. It's not that I don't like him -- I didn't like George Bush I, who said that he didn't consider people like me to be American citizens, but he was my president, because the nature of a broad-based, powerful government is that you're really going to hate some of what it does if you pay attention, but you're still a part of it. No, what's happening is that this administration operates under an entirely different system of government than what I support...

Contempt

After Tuesday's rather remarkable testimony by John Ashcroft, people may wonder if the US Attorney General should really be worried about being held in "contempt of Congress". I'm certainly no lawyer, but, by God, I can still Google...

Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush

A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security.

The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons.

One reason, the lawyers said, would be if military personnel believed that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful."

"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign," the lawyers wrote in the 56-page confidential memorandum, the prohibition against torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority."

Senior Pentagon officials on Monday sought to minimize the significance of the March memo, one of several obtained by The New York Times, as an interim legal analysis that had no effect on revised interrogation procedures that Mr. Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 for the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba...

The March memorandum, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, is the latest internal legal study to be disclosed that shows that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks the administration's lawyers were set to work to find legal arguments to avoid restrictions imposed by international and American law.

A Jan. 22, 2002, memorandum from the Justice Department that provided arguments to keep American officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated was used extensively as a basis for the March memorandum on avoiding proscriptions against torture.

Higher-Ranking Officer Is Sought to Lead the Abu Ghraib Inquiry

The commander of American forces in the Middle East asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld this week to replace the general investigating suspected abuses by military intelligence soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison with a more senior officer, a step that would allow the inquiry to reach into the military's highest ranks in Iraq, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.

The request by the commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, comes amid increasing criticism from lawmakers and some military officers that the half dozen investigations into detainee abuse at the prison may end up scapegoating a handful of enlisted soldiers and leaving many senior officers unaccountable.

General Abizaid's request, which defense officials said Mr. Rumsfeld would most likely approve, was set in motion in the last week when the current investigating officer, Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, told his superiors that he could not complete his inquiry without interviewing more senior-ranking officers, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq.

But Army regulations prevent General Fay, a two-star general, from interviewing higher-ranking officers. So General Sanchez took the unusual step of asking to be removed as the reviewing authority for General Fay's report, and requesting that higher-ranking officers be appointed to conduct and review the investigation.

Ex-Detainees Sue Companies for Their Role in Abuse Case

Lawyers representing former detainees who say they were sexually humiliated, beaten, and tortured at Abu Ghraib prison said Wednesday that they have sued two private companies that provided translators and interrogators at the prison.

The lawsuit, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and a Philadelphia law firm, accuses the Titan Corporation and CACI International Inc. of conspiring to abuse detainees in order to secure more contracts from the United States government.

It alleges that the two companies and three men who worked for them directed and participated in illegal conduct at the prison to squeeze information from detainees in an effort to prove that the companies should be awarded more contracts.

The plaintiffs say they were hooded, raped, stripped naked and kept in isolation, and subjected to repeated beatings with chains and boots.

Two of the men, Stephen A. Stefanowicz and John B. Israel, worked as interrogators for CACI; a third, Adel L. Nakhla, was a translator for Titan.

"It is patently clear that these corporations saw an opportunity to build their businesses by proving they could extract information from detainees in Iraq, by any means necessary," Susan Burke, of the Philadelphia law firm of Montgomery, McCracken, Walker, & Rhoads, said in a statement.

A Titan spokesman, Ralph Williams, called the lawsuit "frivolous."

Physician, Turn Thyself In

According to press reports, military doctors and nurses who examined prisoners at Abu Ghraib treated swollen genitals, prescribed painkillers, stitched wounds, and recorded evidence of the abuses going on around them. Under international law Ñ as well as the standards of common decency Ñ these medical professionals had a duty to tell those in power what they saw.

Instead, too often, they returned the victims of torture to the custody of their victimizers. Rather than putting a stop to torture, they tacitly abetted it, by patching up victims and staying silent.

The duty of doctors in such circumstances is clear. They must provide needed treatment, then do all they can to keep perpetrators from committing further abuse. This includes keeping detailed records of injuries and their likely causes, performing clinical tests to gather forensic evidence and reporting abuses to those with the will and power to act.

During the 1980's and 1990's, American human rights investigators traveled to many countries with oppressive governments, assembling evidence of medical complicity in torture. A pattern emerged in rogue regimes that claimed pride in their civility: doctors both contained and abetted torture Ñ by treating its victims, returning them to perpetrators and then remaining silent.

Military Completed Death Certificates for 20 Prisoners Only After Months Passed

Twenty death certificates for Afghan and Iraqi prisoners who died in American custody were completed in a 10-day rush only after the investigation into the notorious abuses at Abu Ghraib became public last month

The Memory Hole: US Forces Make Iraqis Strip and Walk Naked in Public

On 25 April 2003, the newspaper Dagbladet (Norway) published photos of armed US soldiers forcing Iraqi men to walk naked through a park.

On the chests of the men had been scrawled an Arabic phrase that translates as "Ali Baba - Thief."

A military officer states that the men are thieves, and that this technique will be used again.

No word yet from the newly liberated Iraqi people about some of them being summarily found guilty of theft, forced at gunpoint to strip, having a racist phrase written on their bodies, and then made to walk naked in public. No doubt the Arab/Muslim world is impressed by this display of "democracy," "freedom," "due process," and "no cruel or unusual punishment."

But wait... there's more!

An American news agency says it has seen official papers suggesting that prisoner abuse in Iraq took place at four sites other than Abu Ghraib.
Evidence of abuse has emerged from a marine camp at Nasiriya and army camps at Baghdad International Airport, Qaim and Samarra, the Associated Press says.

The Justice Department Memo: A Commentary Round-Up

It's too bad that it took a pro-torture legal brief to awaken the Washington Post to the grave dangers the Bush Administration poses to democracy. Still, rather than complain about them showing up late to the party, let's embrace the fact that they showed up with this stunning editorial at all.

Perhaps the president's lawyers have no interest in the global impact of their policies -- but they should be concerned about the treatment of American servicemen and civilians in foreign countries. Before the Bush administration took office, the Army's interrogation procedures -- which were unclassified -- established this simple and sensible test: No technique should be used that, if used by an enemy on an American, would be regarded as a violation of U.S. or international law. Now, imagine that a hostile government were to force an American to take drugs or endure severe mental stress that fell just short of producing irreversible damage; or pain a little milder than that of "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." What if the foreign interrogator of an American "knows that severe pain will result from his actions" but proceeds because causing such pain is not his main objective? What if a foreign leader were to decide that the torture of an American was needed to protect his country's security? Would Americans regard that as legal, or morally acceptable? According to the Bush administration, they should.

No comment in the Post about the attempted coup inherent in the Justice Department's Nixonian assertion that the president is above the law and can set it aside at will...

Main weekly Muslim prayers in the holy city of Najaf were scrapped for the first time since the fall of Saddam Hussein...

Hmmm -- I'm no Muslim, but even I know that's not a good sign. And you don't need to be a Muslim to understand this:

Militiamen loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr seized a police station in the center of Najaf on Thursday, set prisoners free and allowed looters to plunder the building...

But they're burying Ronnie -- we're not allowed to pay attention to this today, are we? Nor are we allowed to pay attention to the story about the apples being ordered to be bad...

I GUESS IT DEPENDS ON WHAT THE DEFINITION OF "BARBARISM" IS

You know that the torture memo (PDF file here) says that the president's commander-in-chief authority gives him broad leeway in the conduct of interrogations, and thus shields torturers under his command. And you know it says that Guantanamo prisoners aren't subject to a U.S. law on overseas torture because Guantanamo is U.S. territory, even though the Bush administration has been saying that Guantanamo isn't part of the U.S., and thus U.S. citizens imprisoned there don't deserve due process.

But in addition to that, there's the parsing.

Now, I've heard all the complaints about Bill Clinton's word games in the Lewinsky affair. But Clinton was parsing words having to do with consensual sex...

The torture memo

One cheerful aspect to the torture memo story: it will provide a clear test of the difference between "right-wingers" and "conservatives." Anyone properly calling himself an American conservative will be horrified, and will say so. (William Howard Taft IV, the General Counsel at the State Department, apparently objected but was overruled.)

If the Framers had wanted to give the President emergency authority to suspend the laws, they could have done so. They chose otherwise.

As good Whigs, they had no genuine alternative. Rejection of the claim of an inherent royal power to suspend the laws was the principle behind the Revolution of 1688.

Of course, if he had been a detainee, it would have been OK

Sean Baker was a member of the Kentucky National Guard from 1989 to 1997. During that time, he served in the Gulf War. In the late 90’s, he got out of the Guard, but re-enlisted after September 11th.

In January 2003, Baker was a member of the 438th Military Police company in Operation Enduring Freedom at Guantanamo Bay, where he says he was “given a direct order by an officer in the U.S. Army” to play the role of a detainee for a training exercise.

“I was on duty as an MP in an internal camp where the detainees were housed,” said Baker.

Baker claims that he was ordered to put on one of the orange jumpsuits worn by the detainees. “At first I was reluctant, but he said ‘you’ll be fine…put this on.’ And I did,” said Baker.

Baker says what took place next happened at the hands of four U.S. soldiersÑsoldiers he believes didn’t know he was one of themÑhas changed his life forever.

“They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down,” said Baker. “Then heÑthe same individualÑreached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn’t breath. When I couldn’t breath, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was ‘red.’”

But, Baker says, the beating didn’t stop. “That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me,” he said. “Somehow I got enough air, I muttered out, ‘I’m a U.S. soldier, I’m a U.S. soldier.’”

Baker says it wasn’t until one of the soldiers noticed what Baker was wearing did the exercise stop...

Spec. Sean Baker

The story in a nutshell: an Army National Guard specialist at Guantanamo who was ordered to play an "uncooperative detainee" in an interrogation-training exercise was so badly beaten by the trainees that he had to leave the service with permanent brain injuries. When he applied for disability retirement, he was turned down on the grounds that he had left the service for "unrelated reasons," despite Army medical records contradicting that assertion.

Since the story broke in the press the Army has reversed itself....

Homage au maitre

The President's ever-alert political team seems to have picked up on that possibility, and devised the perfect counterstroke. In a move that can only be called Reaganesque, the President today said that he couldn't recall whether or not he'd read the memos telling him that as Commander in Chief he has "inherent power" to suspend all laws and ignore all treaty obligations.

Brilliant!

(Admittedly, a carping critic might note that the Reaganesque moment had a strongly Nixonian admixture. Mr. Bush's assertion that he hadn't authorized any violations of the law was meaningless, because the theory of the memos is that the President can lawfully do anything he thinks necessary to protect the country, and that his orders so issued confer immunity from prosecution on anyone who follows them. Still, the answer overall had the unmistakable Reagan touch.)

Legalizing Torture

... This week, thanks again to an independent press [see, I knew the Washington Post would come around to the whole fourth estate paradigm sooner or later], we have begun to learn the deeply disturbing truth about the legal opinions that the Pentagon and the Justice Department seek to keep secret. According to copies leaked to several newspapers, they lay out a shocking and immoral set of justifications for torture. In a paper prepared last year under the direction of the Defense Department's chief counsel, and first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, the president of the United States was declared empowered to disregard U.S. and international law and order the torture of foreign prisoners. Moreover, interrogators following the president's orders were declared immune from punishment. Torture itself was narrowly redefined, so that techniques that inflict pain and mental suffering could be deemed legal. All this was done as a prelude to the designation of 24 interrogation methods for foreign prisoners -- the same techniques, now in use, that President Bush says are humane but refuses to disclose.

There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of "national security." For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan -- that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism. The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy...

Torture for Nothing

The Bush Administration dishonored the country, destroyed our reputation for a generation, provided a decade's worth of anti-American propaganda, and abused innocent people for nothing.

The torture can now unequivocally be said to have put US troops at greater danger. And anyone who defends those actions is no longer just short sighted and immoral: they are actively defending increasing the danger to our troops.

Terrorism Archives

And why did they have the wrong information in the report?

When the most recent "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report was issued April 29, senior Bush administration officials immediately hailed it as objective proof that they were winning the war on terrorism. The report is considered the authoritative yardstick of the prevalence of terrorist activity around the world.


"Indeed, you will find in these pages clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight" against global terrorism, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said during a celebratory rollout of the report.


But on Tuesday, State Department officials said they underreported the number of terrorist attacks in the tally for 2003, and added that they expected to release an updated version soon.


Several U.S. officials and terrorism experts familiar with that revision effort said the new report will show that the number of significant terrorist incidents increased last year, perhaps to its highest level in 20 years.

No, sorry, but no. That's idiotic. No printer needs six months of lead time for a report like this. That excuse wasn't worth drawing the breath required to say it. Someone either completely screwed up, or deliberately under-counted. And while the number of attacks is not the best sense of how terrorism is affecting the country, it is an important one. So remember this: Bush has had three years under which he claims terrorism is the most important priority of his government. And the terrorism has gone up.

It's Not the American Way

I am obligated as a journalist to use the word "alleged" when writing about Jose Padilla, the former Chicago gangbanger the government says turned terrorist. He allegedly received terrorist training in Afghanistan. He returned to the United States as an alleged al Qaeda operative. He allegedly planned to detonate a dirty bomb and also allegedly hoped to use natural gas to bring down some apartment buildings in New York or another city. There, I have done my journalistic duty.

The government, on the other hand, is not similarly constrained. Although it has locked up Padilla for two years, although for a long time he was held in isolation and not allowed to see a lawyer or anyone else, he has never been charged with a crime or found guilty in a court of law. The worst I can do is libel the man. The government, though, has cast him into the contemporary version of a dungeon.

This is not to say that Padilla is innocent. The government not only maintains he is a dangerous terrorist but now says he has confessed to much of the above -- and, if it matters any, I believe the feds. But while I accept the government's case, I cannot accept the insistence that it can, when it so chooses, keep a U.S. citizen -- and Padilla is one -- detained for as long as it sees fit. If the man committed a crime, then try him. It's the American way.

The Bush administration takes the position that it can hold Padilla, and others it designates as enemy combatants, for as long as it wants, where it wants and, within reason, how it wants. Torture and summary execution are out of the question, the government conceded in April when it argued its case before the Supreme Court -- but not what could amount to life in prison without trial. In fact, until March, Padilla was not even able to see a lawyer.

A lawyer, it turns out, is precisely what the government wanted to avoid.

Impeach These Clowns. Impeach These Clowns Now

In a calm, measured, reasonable, sane sort of way, Phil Carter goes absolutely apeshit. I see no way to evade the conclusion that George W. Bush has failed to fulfill his constitutional obligations under Article II §3, and deserves to be impeached. Now.

Phil Carter writes:

INTEL DUMP - Archives 2004-06-08 - 2004-06-14: Jess Bravin reports in Monday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about a classified legal memorandum prepared by the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel that appears designed to find every legal workaround possible to justify coercive interrogation and torture at Guantanamo Bay. This report comes in the wake of disclosures about other memoranda Ñ one written in early 2002 by UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo while with the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and a second written by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales Ñ justifying the White House's overall Guantanamo Bay plan. This latest memo, signed in April 2003, goes much further than those though Ñ it specifically authorizes the use of torture tactics, up to and including those which may result in the death of a detainee.

The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national-security considerations or legal technicalities.... [A]t its core is an exceptional argument that because nothing is more important than "obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens," normal strictures on torture might not apply. The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued....

...

The report then offers a series of legal justifications for limiting or disregarding antitorture laws and proposed legal defenses that government officials could use if they were accused of torture. A military official who helped prepare the report said it came after frustrated Guantanamo interrogators had begun trying unorthodox methods on recalcitrant prisoners. "We'd been at this for a year-plus and got nothing out of them" so officials concluded "we need to have a less-cramped view of what torture is and is not."

Your terrorist has no regard for human life. Not even his own.

I missed his show last night and didn't get a chance until just now to catch it, but I just have to say, "bless you Jon Stewart."

He's the only voice I've heard outside the blogosphere who shows the proper incredulity that the United States of America is actually having a national debate about whether we should legally torture people, a large number of whom don't seem to be guilty of anything more than being at the wrong place and the wrong time.

Whoopsie Daisy

The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.

''It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this,'' Rumsfeld said at an international security conference."

Should we put this quote on every campaign web-site, bumper sticker and campaign commercial going forward?

Heavens, yes.

sonofabitch

BUSH: Look, I'm going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you.

We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws. And that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions from me to the government.

Makes you proud to be an American to have a snotty, little asshole of a president refuse to say whether he thinks torture is immoral.

the doctors

In this NY Times op-ed, called Physician, Turn Thyself In, the writer alerts us to another phenomenon that I have wondered about of late concerning torture --- the role of the medical profession.

I wrote about this earlier in this post back on May 22nd, in which I excerpted this NY Times article:

Much of the evidence of abuse at the prison came from medical documents. Records and statements show doctors and medics reporting to the area of the prison where the abuse occurred several times to stitch wounds, tend to collapsed prisoners or see patients with bruised or reddened genitals.

Two doctors recognized that a detainee's shoulder was hurt because he had his arms handcuffed over his head for what they said was "a long period." They gave him an injection of painkiller, and sent him to an outside hospital for what appeared to be a dislocated shoulder, but did not report any suspicions of abuse. One medic, Staff Sgt. Reuben Layton, told investigators that he had found the detainee handcuffed in the same position on three occasions, despite instructing Specialist Graner to free the man.

"I feel I did the right thing when I told Graner to get the detainee uncuffed from the bed," Sergeant Layton told investigators.

The Agenda

This torture memo (pdf) shocked me. And it shocked me not because of its endorsement of torture, we knew something about that already, indeed we've seen pictures of it. No, strangely, it shocked me because it was the product of a bureaucratic "working group" and it was delivered in the dry prose of a government report on the legality of setting aside an executive order on train travel requirements. But this "working group," consisting of lawyers from throughout the executive branch, was tasked with something a little bit different than your average government project. Its job was defining the legal limits of the president's authority to order people to be tortured.

Detainees' Medical Files Shared

Military interrogators at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been given access to the medical records of individual prisoners, a breach of patient confidentiality that ethicists describe as a violation of international medical standards designed to protect captives from inhumane treatment.

The files, which contain individual medical histories and other personal information about prisoners, have been made available to interrogators despite continued objections from the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post. After discovering the practice in mid-2003, the Red Cross refused to send medical monitoring teams to the facility for more than six months, sources said.

There is no universally established international law governing medical confidentiality. But ethics experts said international medical standards bar sharing such information with interrogators to ensure it is not used to pressure prisoners to talk by withholding medicine or by using personal information to torment a detainee.

Terrorism INCREASES under Bush

So will Armitage call a new press conference to announce that "you will find in these pages clear evidence that we are losing the fight" against global terrorism?

Cooking Up Excuses With the Pentagon - How to torture alleged terrorists and get away with it

However, no amount of caveating can save the latest Defense Department memorandum on the legality of torture (first reported by the Wall Street Journal) from being construed as what it is: a cookbook on how to conduct illegal torture and get away with it. The memo discusses ways to deprive federal courts of jurisdiction over Guantanamo Bay, lays out ways for government employees to avoid culpability under federal law, and explains why the president can unilaterally nullify the federal war-crimes statute, among other things. In case that's not enough, it also recommends that spooks and interrogators get written orders from the president, so they can offer a Nuremberg-style "superior orders" defense if prosecuted.

In any criminal or civil case, courts must start with the question of whether they have jurisdiction to hear the case in the first instance. Appropriately enough, the memo explains how to avoid the exercise of American jurisdiction over Guantanamo Bay. Notably, the memo concludes that the federal anti-torture statute does not apply to American personnel at Guantanamo Bay because that base is within the "special maritime and territorial jurisdiction" of the United StatesÑwhile the torture statute's text limits its application to locations "outside of the United States." The fact that the offenses happen on U.S. military property means they're outside the reach of U.S. criminal law. This is hairsplitting with the precision of an electron microscope, but it produces the desired result for the Pentagon: America's anti-torture statute does not apply to the place where we are holding detainees in the war on terrorism...

Second copy of the torture memo... (the first was at NPR)

The Wall Street Journal has posted their copy of the torture memo.

It's obviously a different copy. (Compare the first page!) Therefore... at least two different people have broken the 'SECRET' rating of the memo

Bush says he never authorized illegal interrogations

President Bush said Thursday he never authorized the use of any interrogation techniques in the war on terrorism that would violate U.S. or international laws.

"The authorization I issued was that anything we did would conform to U.S. law and would be consistent with international treaty obligations," Bush told reporters at the G8 Summit.

The comment came in response to a question about a report prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last year, which was based on an advisory opinion from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

CNN obtained a copy of the March 6, 2003, report, which said that in detaining al Qaeda and Taliban members, the United States was not bound by prohibitions against torture in the Geneva Conventions.

Asked whether he has seen the memos, Bush replied, "I can't remember if I've seen the memo or not."

Ashcroft Refuses to Release Torture Memo

A Plunge From the Moral Heights

Come and sit with me for a moment. I am in a room, in a Middle Eastern country, and I am talking to a government official. He mentions the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the U.S.-run prison outside Baghdad, and what this has done to America's image in his region. He smiles at what he says, for he is a man who appreciates irony. Of course, this same thing happens in his country, he says. Inwardly, I smile back, smug in my confidence that Abu Ghraib or no Abu Ghraib, America is a different sort of nation. It now seems I was a bit too smug.

The recent revelations that the Justice Department prepared memos parsing what is and what is not torture brings to mind regimes that, well, I would rather not bring to mind. These are the torturers of the world, although they deny it, and to bolster their lie they produce copious laws against the practice.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, whose Justice Department prepared the memos -- one of them running to 50 pages and signed by Jay S. Bybee, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel -- assured the Senate the other day that the memos are of no consequence. They were only internal Justice Department stuff, the scribblings of lawyers and -- most important -- the president has not "directed or ordered" torture, Ashcroft said. In another administration, such an assurance would be enough for me, but given this one's cavalier approach to civil liberties, I have to note that "directed" or "ordered" is not the same as condoned. That's what I wonder about.

I wonder, too, why the much-pressed Justice Department -- all those news releases to get out extolling Ashcroft -- went to all the trouble of coming up with definitions of torture that might be permissible under U.S. law when no one was supposedly considering torturing al Qaeda prisoners in the first place. A 50-page memo is not an hour's work. It's clear someone had torture in mind...

If it has a real case, U.S. should take suspected terrorist to court [from the Lufkin, TX Daily News, of all places - the administration's own home court]

Deputy Attorney General James Comey on Tuesday presented a powerful opening statement in the trial of suspected al-Qaida terrorist Jose Padilla. Too bad a jury likely will never hear it, because it's unlikely there will ever be a trial.

Instead, Comey presented his indictment of Padilla -- complete with vivid descriptions of terror plots Padilla failed to execute -- as part of a public relations blitz to justify holding Padilla and other American citizens as "enemy combatants" in the war on terrorism. Comey said intelligence during interrogations of Padilla and other suspected terrorists justifies the decision not to criminally charge Padilla, and proceed with a normal prosecution, after he was arrested two years ago at the Chicago airport.

“He would very likely have followed his lawyer’s advice and said nothing, which would have been his constitutional right,” Comey said. “He would likely have ended up a free man, with our only hope being to try to follow him 24 hours a day, seven days a week and hope -- pray really -- that we didn’t lose him."

Maybe Padilla's arrest and subsequent interrogations prevented another major terrorist attack, or maybe not. That uncertainty, though, does not warrant the government holding Padilla without charges and denying him his right to counsel and other constitutional protections usually afforded to American citizens charged with a crime.

Timely Memory Lapses

DAVID SANGER (NY Times): Mr. President, the Justice Department issued an advisory opinion last year declaring that as Commander-in-Chief you have the authority to order any kind of interrogation techniques that are necessary to pursue the war on terror.

Were you aware of this advisory opinion?

Do you agree with it?

And did you issue any such authorization at any time?

BUSH: No, the authorization I issued, David, was that anything we did would conform to US law and would be consistent with international treaty obligations.

That's the message I gave our people.

SANGER: Have you seen the memos?

BUSH: I can't remember if I've seen the memo or not, but I gave those instructions.

The first part of the answer -- "conform[ing] to US law" -- is a meaningless non-answer.

It's pretty rare to explicitly, formally authorize breaking the law.

Instead, the Bushies "interpreted" the law to their satisfaction first (including where they deemed it does and doesn't apply), so following the arbitrary conclusions magically becomes following the law.

And as far as what they think "consistent with international treaty obligations" means, go back to LiberalOasis' 5/14 post, recapping a NBC Nightly News report:

JIM MIKLASZEWSKI: …[Don] Rumsfeld said Pentagon lawyers approved the techniques, and claimed the Geneva Convention is open to interpretation by each nation.

RUMSFELD: …if you think about it, Geneva doesn't say what do you when you get up in the morning.

Procrastination: Torture, Empire and Forgetfulness

We know an attack is coming, but not when, where, what; we have a guy in custody who we know that he definitely knows about the attack; and he’ll tell us about the attack when tortured. In the real world, we never have that information. The guy we have in custody might be innocent or our intelligence about a terrorist attack might be wrong, etc.

The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued. Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the “necessity” of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or “superior orders,” sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no “moral choice was in fact possible.”

Hey, it’s not me comparing these guys to the Nazis, they are doing that themselves.

[Let's call the new prison at Abu Ghraib] Ronald W. Reagan International Correctional Facility

With the Iran-Iraq war escalating, President Ronald Reagan dispatched his Middle East envoy, a former secretary of defense, to Baghdad with a hand-written letter to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and a message that Washington was willing at any moment to resume diplomatic relations.

That envoy was Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld's December 19-20, 1983 visit to Baghdad made him the highest-ranking US official to visit Iraq in 6 years. He met Saddam and the two discussed "topics of mutual interest," according to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. "[Saddam] made it clear that Iraq was not interested in making mischief in the world," Rumsfeld later told The New York Times. "It struck us as useful to have a relationship, given that we were interested in solving the Mideast problems."

Yes, It Was U.S. Policy to Torture Detainees

George Bush acknowledges that it was U.S. policy to torture detainees--and that such torture is legal inasmuch as he as president has the power to suspend whatever laws he chooses.

We just never made the connection between all those arms we sold Saddam and the huge steaming piles of dead Iraqis, is all: torture is different if we're paying for it through a middleman

[gleefully racist swine, National Review favorite and new CNN commentator] Dinesh D'Souza: Your question commits the anachronistic fallacy. You're using information available now to condemn Reagan for the decisions he made then. Obviously he didn't know what we now know. This is no fair way to evaluate a statesman. Consider: We now know Bin Laden is a bad guy. But was the U.S. wrong to support the Afghan mujahedin who were fighting Soviet oppression, even though the group included Bin Laden? Of course not! The Soviets were the great threat then and we were right to respond to it. So too the great threat in the 1980s was Khomeini and the radical Islamic revolution he unleashed. Khomeini unleashed the wave of Islamic radicalism that has now swept the 22 countries of Islam. Without Khomeini, it's hard for me to envision Bin Laden. That's why Reagan leaned toward Hussein, as a counterweight against Khomeini. (Remember the Iran-Iraq war?) In sum, Reagan was no "apologist for Saddam" any more than Churchill was an "apologist for Stalin" by allying with him against Hitler in WW-2.

Honestly! I hardly know where to begin in describing what's wrong with this garbage, but let's start with the utterly absurd notion that only "information available now" tells us how bad Saddam was. Not only were human rights groups documenting human rights abuses in Iraq in the eighties, but according to Kenneth Pollack, the CIA was constantly warning that Saddam "was a very nasty character." In 1983, George Schultz was told that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iranians "almost daily." There is no way to argue that they did not know. They knew. They just didn't care.

And what really galls me is that D'Souza knows that, which is why he moves so quickly to Justification B...