Days after the Justice Department closed out its criminal investigation of the deaths of two detainees while in the custody of the C.I.A., new information has surfaced calling into question official accounts of the extent of waterboarding by American interrogators.
A new report by the nonprofit group Human Rights Watch, based on documents and interviews in Libya after the fall of its dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, includes a detailed description of what appears to be a previously unknown instance of waterboarding by the C.I.A. in Afghanistan nine years ago.
That claim clashes with repeated assertions by current and former agency officials that only three high-level terrorism suspects — none of them Libyans — were waterboarded.
The account documented by Human Rights Watch could not be independently corroborated. But the report’s description of interrogation methods, based on individual interviews with former prisoners who had not sought out the human rights workers, match up with official documents on C.I.A. techniques. It underscores how much is still not known about the United States’ treatment of terrorist suspects during the early years of the Bush administration.
While the report has yet to be independently verified, this is one story you’re going to want to keep an eye on in the days/weeks ahead.
If your baseline is the Bush years, it’s night and day. If your baselines are a set of first principles, as the ACLU calls for, or as us openness advocates call for, then your situation is: Is the glass half full or the glass half empty?Tom Blanton, director of GWU’s National Security Archive • Discussing national security powers afforded to the Presidency, and the U.S. government. The impetus of this was the unearthing of a memo, authored back in 2006 by a Bush administration State Department counselor, Philip Zelikow. In it, he insists to the administration that their policy on waterboarding, among other things, amounted to a “felony.” The renewed conversation on American ethics and legal authority has shone a light on the Obama administration, as well, however. While the President publicly condemned waterboarding on his second day in office, his administration still employs extraordinary renditions, and his reluctance to renounce many of the broadened powers his predecessor accrued may set precedent, rendering what was once unique and limited the new functional norm. Says Jameel Jaffer, national security expert for the ACLU: “The administration has clearly disavowed torture, and that is an important and welcome thing. But they’re steadily building a framework for impunity.” source (via • follow)
As our mothers used to tell us, “Even a broken watch tells the right time twice a day.”
Hey, GOP candidates, listen to this guy. When he talks about torture, he doesn’t talk about it in the theoretical. He, personally, knows what it’s like.
Herman Cain sees waterboarding as an “enhanced interrogation technique,” not torture, and would support it. He looks super-uncomfortable answering the question on torture. Bachmann, meanwhile, was far more comfortable on agreeing with this; Ron Paul, meanwhile, says it’s illegal, immoral and ineffective. Huntsman came out against it as well.
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