Filed under: Crime and Justice, Mother Jones, Scandals | Tags: Bush administration, Eric Holder, interrogation, Obama adminstration, Torture
August 10, 2009
One of the reasons Democrats were so excited to see Obama in the Oval Office was that he has pledged to demand some accountability for government officials who participated in torture under the Bush administration. But even after Obama’s first few months, it became deafeningly clear that his torture initiatives would be even more toothless than expected. In August, Attorney General Eric Holder caught fire when he proposed a torture probe would not target the authors of the so-called torture memos or Bush administration officials who knew what was going on. Instead, the probe would only hold accountable those soldiers who went beyond the interrogation tactics approved by the Bush administration. I reported the response of the human rights community for MoJo. Here’s an excerpt:
Opinions were divded among human rights and civil liberties groups about the merits of this approach. On the one hand, Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, thinks that a probe that lets the authors of the interrogation policies off the hook would be more destructive than constructive. “An investigation that focuses only on low-ranking operators would be, I think, worse than doing nothing at all,” he told the Los Angeles Times….
But Gabor Rona, the international legal director of Human Rights First, is more optimistic about the proposed inquiry. He agrees that the investigation should not be confined to low-level interrogators because “if we end up having scapegoats as responsible people instead of those who authorized and solicited torture, then it would be an abdication of our international legal responsibility.” But he thinks it would be possible to start with those who overstepped the rules of interrogation and cast a wider net later—that is, if federal investigators follow where the evidence leads and investigate accordingly.
Filed under: Foreign Affairs, Mother Jones | Tags: Bush administration, extremism, John Brennan, Terrorism
August 6, 2009
Months before President Obama committed to sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, his senior adviser for Homeland Security and Counter terrorism laid out the administration’s 5-pronged strategy to the war on terrorism. Brennan was a bit of an odd choice to deliver the speech, because of his ties to the Bush administration and reported clashes with administration officials with respect to declassifying the notorious torture memos. But he’s Obama’s guy and laid out the cautious strategy in August. I deciphered the speech’s meaning and context for MoJo. An excerpt:
Brennan stressed the importance of restoring America’s moral reputation. A key strength of the President’s anti-terrorism strategy, he said, is that it no longer undermines national security by turning the American forces into monsters with the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. Such actions, he said, “were not in keeping with our values as Americans, and these practices have been rightly terminated.” Brennan’s repudiation of these techniques is especially interesting because he was Obama’s first choice for CIA chief, but withdrew his name after critics said he was too soft on torture, which paved the way for the eventual choice Leon Panetta.
Filed under: Civil Rights, Crime and Justice, Talking Points Memo | Tags: Bush administration, KSM, Torture
March 16. 2009
Barely two months into Barack Obama’s presidency, there remained very few historical accounts proving that the Bush administration authorized torture for its War on Terror. In mid-March, a journalism professor and New Yorker contribute added one of the most complete historical accounts of torture to date in an article for the New York Review of Books. Danner wrote about a confidential report he obtained from the International Committee of the Red Cross that listed, in detail, the torture techniques used on three suspected terrorists, Abu Zubaydah, Walid Bin Attash, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who currently awaits his civilian trial in New York City. I summerized Danner’s piece in a post for TPMmuckraker. Read my synopsis for some of the details about the horrific torture methods used against Zubaydah, Bin Attash, and KSM. Here’s the kicker:
Danner came to a few key conclusions after reading the ICRC report: most importantly, the Bush administration approved torture in its questioning of al Qaeda suspects as early as 2002. And everyone in the administration, including President Bush, knew it was happening.
Danner says that it is unclear exactly how successful these tactics were in gathering key information about potential terrorists. But one key comment from Khaled Shaik Mohammed indicates that the information is worthless. In the worst moments of torture, Mohammed says he “gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop.” This information undoubtedly “wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts.”
Ben Buchwalter 