The Smoking Gun In Torture Controversy-Implicate CIA DOJ & Bush Admin Officials"

Fighting torture

David Cole, a law professor, has written a book about the Justice Department torture memos, which he said were the “smoking gun’’ in the controversy.

Long before Sept. 11, 2001, constitutional scholar David Cole was litigating cases involving national security and civil liberties, and since then he has done extensive work on the issues. The CIA’s controversial interrogation tactics - including waterboarding - were revealed to the public with the release of a newly declassified version of a 2004 Inspector General’s report. Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University, has included all six Justice Department memos authorizing those tactics in a new book, “The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable.’’ The memos, Cole says, are the “smoking gun’’ in the torture controversy: They implicate not only CIA interrogators but Justice Department lawyers and top officials in the Bush administration. Cole, who will speak at Harvard on Monday and Northeastern on Tuesday, talked to the Globe about the memos, his book, and torture.


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A. One might say that after 9/11 there was a tremendous amount of fear and a lot of pressures and so people acted in ways that may be wrong but are understandable. But four years after 9/11, memos are continuing to authorize the same tactics even though they now know the CIA has abused those tactics . . . and that no ticking time bombs have been averted as a result of these tactics. Even though they knew there was no basis for saying these tactics were in fact helpful in getting information we couldn’t otherwise get, even as lawyers and the public sought to put more constraints on these activities, they were never willing to say “no.’’

Q. Should people be prosecuted?

A. As a legal matter, they’re actually obliged to investigate and refer for prosecution anyone within the US against whom there’s credible evidence that they participated in torture, under the Convention Against Torture that we signed and helped write in 1984. We haven’t met that obligation, and I think we should. I’m not holding my breath until the day vice president Cheney is in the dock.

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A. I think moving forward includes accountability for those who committed crimes in the past. President Obama knows it’s going to be politically divisive to hold accountable people as powerful as a former vice president or high-level lawyers who are now judges and distinguished law professors. But that’s not an excuse. People should not be let off the hook because they’re powerful and because holding them responsible might be politically difficult.

more:
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2009/09/19/david_cole_fights_back_against_torture/


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CIA Torturers Running Scared

By Ray McGovern
September 19, 2009

In what should be seen as a bizarre twist, seven CIA directors — including three who are themselves implicated in planning and conducting torture and assassination — have asked the President to call off Holder.

Please, tell me how could the whole thing be more transparent?

Now, out in the public domain is all the evidence needed to show that war crimes were committed — “authorized” as legal by Justice Department Mafia-type lawyers recruited for that express purpose — but war crimes nonetheless.

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Quite a group, this Gang of Seven.

Their letter also is condescending toward President Obama: “As President you have the authority to make decisions restricting substantive interrogation… But the administration must be mindful that public disclosure about past intelligence operations can only help al-Qaeda elude US intelligence and plan future operations.”

The seven then proceed to repeat the canard alleging that such collection “have saved lives and helped protect America from further attacks.”

It reads as though Dick Cheney did their first draft. Actually, that would not be all that surprising, given his record of doing quite a lot of CIA’s drafting for eight long years.

Hold firm Holder.

more:
http://consortiumnews.com/2009/091909a.html