Edited on Sat Dec-15-07 02:19 PM by L. Coyote
Of course, the first person I thought should read this OP, and who could
shed some light on the issue, was Scott Horton. So, I sent him an alert.
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The President’s Coming-Out Party
BY Scott Horton - Dec 15, 2007 -
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/12/hbc-90001917This has been an important week in the torture debate in America. It has been the week of the President’s coming-out party. Up until this point, torture has been something that “a few rotten apples” do. When evidence of it erupted in the media, a few grunts were quickly rounded up and scapegoated. Never officers, mind you—after all, they generally knew where the orders came from, and if you prosecuted them, they might just tell.
But this week, a CIA agent, John Kiriakou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, and explained just how the system works. When we want to torture someone (and it is torture he said, no one involved with these techniques would ever think anything different), we have to write it up. The team leader of the torture team proposes what torture techniques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Operations at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hierarchy of the Company. Then the proposal is passed to the Justice Department to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Security Council in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose personal authority is invoked for each and every instance of torture authorized. And, according to Kiriakou as well as others, Bush’s answer is never “no.” He has never found a case where he didn’t find torture was appropriate.
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This is the background against which the current acts of the new Attorney General, Michael B. Mukasey must be judged. As I noted previously, there is a strong basis to fear that Mukasey came up through a litmus test under which he was required to do two things: (1) to give his commitment to continue to provide cover for the torture system, and (2) to block any effort to have a meaningful criminal investigation that would disclose the torture system or any of its details. As things now stand, it looks like Mukasey is delivering on these test points. He’s been on the job for a month, and he continues to publicly refrain from expressing an opinion on waterboarding. This signals that there has been no change in the status quo ante, namely, torture techniques including waterboarding remain on the agenda, available for use.
So that takes us to the key question of getting to the bottom of it. The Justice Department has announced an “initial probe” into the destruction of the CIA torture tapes. There is no credible basis upon which this can be viewed as anything other than a conscious crime. The tapes were destroyed, .............
DISCUSS at: Mukasey's Litmus Test-1) Cover-up Torture 2) Block Criminal Investigations (Scott Horton)
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2473859PLEASE Rec that important thread!!!