” “How effective is a tactic you have to use 266 times?” said Darmer. “We are lawyers. Our job is to follow the law. Torture is illegal and it’s also wrong.”

Yoo, who was joined in his defense by Chapman law school Dean John Eastman, scoffed at his opponents.

“What I hear from Prof. Darmer and Prof. Rosenthal is that they would, in the same circumstance, rule out any form of coercive interrogation no matter who we help – including and up to Osama bin Laden – no matter what the circumstances,” said Yoo, who is now a visiting professor at Chapman law school.

“Was it worth it? We haven’t had an attack in more than seven years. Fifty percent of the information that we have on al Qaeda and its workings came from interrogation.”

http://www.ocregister.com/arti…..g-coercive

Democracy Now! had good coverage of Jessen and Mitchell yesterday.

http://www.democracynow.org/20…..associates

Apparently, they don’t ever speak to the press. They should definitely start talking to their lawyers.

I bet the sooner we lock up dick cheney and his minions at the CIA the threat level drops.

Yoo: “Was it worth it? We haven’t had an attack in more than seven years. Fifty percent of the information that we have on al Qaeda and its workings came from interrogation.”

Yoo, shut up. The information was from FALSE CONFESSIONS designed by YOO.

Jeepers, Jane. 4 am? I have to give up keeping up with Marcy at midnight every night, don’t know how you did it.

From Democracy Now:

KATHERINE EBAN: Well, from my research, I found exactly the opposite, that there had been an FB—the issue is very active over the detainee Abu Zubaydah, and there had been an FBI interrogation team with him initially, which had basically nursed him back to health after gunshot wounds and used rapport-building, classic rapport-building tactics, which is what the FBI excels at, and it was because of those tactics that he revealed that KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was the architect of 9/11 and also revealed the name of Jose Padilla, and that in fact he was talking to interrogators until Mitchell showed up along with the CIA interrogation team, began imposing these harsh tactics, and Zubaydah clammed up.

I can’t even make a comment about this.

From this morning’s NYT article by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti:

WASHINGTON — The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?

(snip)

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

How gobsmackingly stupid is that?!? These people are supposed to be the best and brightest? Oh my.

I hope there is no 9/11 type of commission. It was a total sham. The commission only received 60% of the documents they requested. Zelikow, Condi’s guy, in effect wrote the report.

Throw all of their asses in jail.

How’s that for sugar-coating my sentiment?

Jane my check is in the mail !
We need more investigative journalists out there, especially ones not beholden to corporate interests

I hope there is no 9/11 type of commission. It was a total sham.

Quite right. These “bi-partisan” commissions (Warren Commission, 9/11, etc.) are designed from the start to be negotiated cover-ups.

That is why they are always the go-to tool for dealing with important matters.

The governor of the state with the most excecutions turns into to the president that tortures. Go figure.

Including the “journalists” who aided and abetted them. Goebbels would have brought up on war crimes charges had he not committed suicide in the bunker.

We need some Enhanced Captivity Techniques for these perps

Why didn’t they listen to psychiatrist Major Charles Burney? He explained everything to the Senate investigators. He confirmed that a major reason for interrogation was to get an Iraq-al Qaeda connection. He also confirmed that the SERE trainers at Fort Bragg warned that torture produces false information. Putting that together: torture was carried out in order to get a false Iraq-al Qaeda connection. I put the details in an Oxdown.

(Of course “The Dark Side” has already dealt with its lowly minion Timmeh Russert…)

Using their own assesment methods, one could argue that we suffered no terrorist attacks from al Qaida between when the WTC parking garage was bombed and when they flew planes into the buildings (yes, I do know that is not really the case, btw). The truth is we WERE attacked repeatedly by al Quaida during the Bush administration.

Setting that aside for a moment, the truth is that the same information about the workings of al Qaida would have been available to us using other methods that are far less coercive and far more reliable. Other interrogation methods produce much more reliable information and produce it nearly as quickly. With the higher level of reliability, you actually end up operating more efficiently because you don’t waste resources chasing down false leads.

Setting that aside as well, the thing is that the use of torture seems to have been for two functions:
1) falsifying a link between al Qaida and Iraq, and
2) punishing people tangentially involved with the 9/11 attacks (and by “tangentially involved” I mean they had the same skin color, not that they had any actual links to al Qaida or OBL).
Neitehr of those goals is justifiable, nor was torture to accomplish them.

The truth is that they used methods at the whim of the executive branch and expected no accountability to be taken, and I think they really believe that they will never be held to account for those methods and crimes. We need to prove them wrong and hold the executive branch accountable to the laws of this country just as we would any member of the public who used similar methods without government sanction.

• Jessen and Mitchell modeled their torture program on methods used by the North Koreans to extract false confessions.

I’m just picturting an absurd scene where our people are slamming around and waterboarding detainees who tell them nothing and our guys leave shaking their heads “Don’t these idiots know how easy it is to get us to stop. All they have to do is lie to us.” Detainees were probbaly under the impression that we actually were torturing them because we wanted the truth. So you see, it was all just a big miscommunication.

Some US captives were Tortured to Death.

See, “Homicide Unpunished,” a Washington Post editorial

excerpt:

ONE OF THE most shocking photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq shows a grinning guard giving a thumbs-up sign over the bruised corpse of an Iraqi detainee. Subsequent investigation showed that the deceased prisoner, an Iraqi named Manadel al-Jamadi, died of asphyxiation on Nov. 4, 2003: He was tortured to death by Navy SEAL and CIA interrogators who took turns punching and kicking him, then handcuffed his arms behind his back and shackled them to a window five feet above the floor. Nine SEALs, a sailor and several CIA personnel were implicated in the killing.

“Down a Dark Road,” by Richard Leiby

excerpt:

Researchers at Human Rights First have categorized more than 70 detainee deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as homicides linked to gross recklessness, abuse or torture. The findings are based largely on the military’s own records, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, according to Hina Shamsi, an attorney for the organization.

“Murder’s torture,” Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former Colin Powell aide, says . . . “Murder’s the ultimate torture.”

“Autopsy reports reveal homicides of detainees in U.S. custody” — DOD documents published by the ACLU

excerpt:

“. . . died during interrogation . . . died during interrogation . . . Manner of Death: Homicide . . . Homicide . . . Homicide. . .”

Command’s Responsibility: Detainee Deaths in U.S. Custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Human Rights First

Medical Investigations of Homicides of Prisoners of War in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Steven H. Miles, MD

The proverbial cat is now out of its proverbial bag.

This is on its way to getting very ugly.

Beautiful!

Excellent info! Now, with all of this knowledge of corrupted justifications, convictions of these traitors to the American constitution should not be very hard to get, right?

“he was surprised when he found out later that Lt Col Baumgartner had forwarded his memo to the General Counsel’s office”

well hey, at least they’re consistent

Sleep Expert “surprised and saddened” to find research twisted in OLC memo

Now NDI Dennis Blair states in a memo, according to AP that the US got “high value information” from torture.

Great! I thought he was a bozo, now I pretty certain of it. If we got such great info from torture, why are we loosing ground in Afghanistan and Pakistani is circling the drain due to “Islamic militants”?

from a comment I made last night:

Obama says no prosecution for “those who carried some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided by the WH, I do not think that it is appropriate for them to be prosecuted.”

that’s a hole big enough to drive a truck(load) of potential defendants through.

If there’s a commission bet somehow my boy , senator duel citizen Arlin s., will be in the thick of it.
How much can one man trash the United States.
Ira Longhorne (?) the girlfriend killer defense attorney skiped to France.
Warren commission Single bullet THEORY.
Anita Hill gets you justice thomas ( Deciding a civil rights case just today)
Iran Contra
I can see this one coming from ten miles away.

Have these idiots never heard of Stockholm Syndrome?

Is it possible that the imminent publication of this report led the President to walk back Rahm Emmanuel’s blanket pardons?

Was this too much evidence in the public realm for the “Let bygones be bygones.” tactic to be effective?

Is this the straw that broke the camel’s back?

“four corners” -> to the letter, in “good faith”

Nobody who torments children to extract information is acting in good faith; where is that in SERE, by the way?

And nobody who assists in waterboarding 266 times between two detainees a la méthode de la Corée du Nord is acting in good faith.

Bad faith -> outside the four corners.

As I suggested the other evening in EW’s post, what happened in no way looks like SERE training; it looks like the Shock Doctrine at highly individualized level, like the work of Ewen Cameron as described by Naomi Klein.

Zubaydah was both a first attempt and a proof-of-concept; they were going to make it work with KSM because it had to with the start of the war in the same month. They needed it to work so badly that they moved KSM to a black site in Poland only days after he was taken into custody, which further implies that worse was done than we’ve read so far. (Transit time eats into your waterboarding schedule, you know?) The stakes were so high they even paid off Poland with a missile defense system for their cooperation and potential exposure to prosecution by the ICC. (God knows the Ossetian/Georgian mess last year was probably a ruse to ensure the payoff would go through Congress.)

Jane, just a quick point: looking at EW’s Ghorbanifar Meetings Timeline for the period of the spring 2003, particularly May 2003, it sure looks as if some neocons were trying to plant ‘anti-Israeli’ pamphlets, along with bogus signs of WMD, in Iraq. Ties in with your point that:

Jessen and Mitchell modeled their torture program on methods used by the North Koreans to extract false confessions.

Sen Carl Levin phrased it diplomatically to McClatchy: BushCheney were trying to make linkages where none actually existed.

May 2003 was the month that Kristof mentioned Wilson’s claims about the Niger forgeries, and IIRC it was also the month that Bolton and others started trying to find out the identity of Kristoff’s source. Then within two months, Plame was ‘outed’.

Putting the various timelines together, this thing is incredibly sinister.

Democracy Now! had good coverage of Jessen and Mitchell yesterday.

Amy Goodman was one of the first to treat the grassroots revolt against the APA’s high poohbahs as news, which it was. I congratulated her about it a few weeks ago when she was in town.

“”It’s sort of like saying it’s okay to throw someone out of a plane because you pushed them off the porch and they were fine.”"

you know the U.S. army inteligence and CIA personell actually DID that during the Vietnam occupation.. they threw VC suspects out of helicopters.

sorry,but,HUH?

A la Maslow: If you deprive a person of physiological and safety needs, you obtain dysfunctional personalities. A la Bush and Tenet, that is the human state which has the greatest potential for extracting information from a non compliant person. Sadly, I strongly suspect that Tenet and Bush have humiliated and degraded this country because they were too stupid to ask the right questions in the right environment. Moreover, the Clintons never planned for or advanced any Arabic language facility at the CIA when it became clear in the 90s that that should have been priority no.1 next to removing Tenet as CIA director, a Clinton appointee.

Zelikow was on Rachel Maddow’s show last night backpedaling wildly, assuring the world that he and Condi had done everything they could to stop the madness but those mean guys in the VPs office kept right on stealing their lunch money. Pathetic weasel.

I will never accept the idea that “Bush did” because of stupidity. His own brother said that was a famous act as a boy to escape consequences for his actions.
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1010-26.htm
This very article is related to the manufacture of bogus ‘intelligence’ !
http://www.leadingtowar.com/?g…..agodg1tzRw
I do love synopses.

Odd that Zlikow crept out of his hole to appear on Rachel’s show immediately prior to Levin’s release of the long-delayed report. Condi’s legacy must be burnished.

Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney “demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration,” despite the fact that the CIA told them repeatedly that no such collaboration existed. So, extracting false confessions was the goal.

You mean it wasn’t to defuse a ticking time bomb?