Ironically, as President Obama was trying to tuck away any more photographs revealing the US Government’s torture of detainees, former Bush Administration official Philip Zelikow was dissecting the legal and political cover for “enhanced interrogations” in testimony to a Senate committee. He reiterated that the techniques was approved at the highest levels of the Bush White House, including by his immediate boss, Condoleezza Rice, and that his memorandum objecting to the torture (still classified by the US Government) was blocked by other Bush officials. And he offered this pertinent point: if the torture methods were considered legal in their application against “foreign” detainees, then they would also be legal in application against US citizens.
C-SPAN has decided to charge $60 for the videos of the hearings before the Senate committee, which also included testimony by Ali Soufan (posted in a separate entry), the FBI agent who questioned 9-11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. So we offer two videos — a summary of the Soufan and Zelikow testimonies and Zelikow’s interview with Rachel Maddow — and the transcript of Zelkow’s statement:
With the latest entry in the “It Wasn’t Torture, but If It Was, That’s A-OK”, submitted by a Ms Condoleezza Rice, I think it’s high time we gave the Bushmen and Bushwomen the hearing they deserve:
“President Raccoon had a magic letter, so it was not a violation of Common Article III of the Geneva Conventions”
On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Their immediate purpose was to speak for $83.4 billion in “supplemental” funds beyond the Federal Government’s budget for this year, but in defending that request, they offered important clues to future US policy from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Iran to Israel-Palestine. Clinton’s opening remarks are posted in a separate entry, and we’ll have an analysis later.
GATES: Mr. Chairman, Senator Cochran, members of the committee:
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to discuss the Fiscal Year 2009 Supplemental Request.
I am honored to be here with Secretary Clinton. Our joint appearance symbolizes the continuing improvement in relationships and close collaboration between the Departments of State and Defense. As Secretary Clinton said, this is intended to be the last planned war supplemental request that the administration will make. Future budgets, starting with FY10, will instead be presented together – with money for overseas contingency operations clearly marked as such. Read the rest of this entry »
Two days ago, we flashed back to the 2003 legal framework for the Bush Administration’s authorisation of torture (Mora: “Are you saying the President has the authority to order torture?”; White House lawyer John Yoo: “Yes”). In case you thought that was simply a rogue comment, consider this exchange between a questioner and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Stanford University (it begins at about 0:58 in the clip):
In case you didn’t catch it, Rice says, “the president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture….And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.” Read the rest of this entry »
This morning, I was catching up with the newspapers when a friend/reader Skyped about our recent item, “Dick Cheney’s Fox Interview and the Defence of Torture”: “Surely there must be some date by which I can hope to never ever see Cheney’s face on EA again.”
While I could understand the sentiment, it also brought on depression about how this torture discussion will probably “go away”. The barrage of news stories and commentary — now that many in the American “mainstream” media, with the Bush Administration in the rear-view mirror, has decided torture should be noticed — brings on fatigue. Now that Cheney, formerly the most secretive Vice President in history, has decided that he will incessantly shine his own distorted light on “enhanced interrogation”, I have the sense from his smirk that he knows he is wearing us down. Read the rest of this entry »
For the defendants of the use of torture by U.S. forces — still led by former Vice President Dick Cheney — this has been a rocky few weeks, with the publication, in swift succession, of the leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (PDF), based on interviews with the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, which concluded that their treatment “constituted torture” (and was accompanied by two detailed articles by Mark Danner for the New York Review of Books), the release, by the Justice Department, of four memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2002 and 2005, which purported to justify the use of torture by the CIA, and the release of a 231-page investigation into detainee abuse conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee (PDF.) Read the rest of this entry »
[This] leaves only the Pakistani military, whichever way it chooses to play the hand with the Americans, as the only significant force in the country with a symbolic and real modicum of power. If Zardari protests this, the prospect of his overthrow emerges. If he accepts his emasculation, he is no more than an irrelevant figurehead. Either way, it’s an effective coup.
Last Thursday, I embarked on a new, challenging, and exciting project, working with postgraduate students at the Clinton Institute for American Studies in Dublin . Introducing a course on contemporary US foreign policy, I tried out the idea of dissecting that morning’s Page 1 story, whatever it might be, in The New York Times.
Organizers reported Sunday that the 44th White House Carnival was a rousing success, raising a record $800,000,066,845 for the federal government—$800 billion of which came from a dunk tank featuring Dick Cheney….
Tags: 9/11 Commission, al-Qaeda, Alberto Gonzales, Ali Soufan, Condoleezza Rice, Convention Against Torture, Dana Priest, Detainees, Donald Rumsfeld, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Geneva Conventions, George Tenet, Gordon England, Guantanamo Bay, Harriet Miers, John Ashcroft, John Bellinger, John Helgerson, John McCain, Justice Department, Lindsey Graham, Matt Waxman, Office of Legal Counsel, Philip Zelikow, Rachel Maddow, SERE training, Torture 
On Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Their immediate purpose was to speak for $83.4 billion in “supplemental” funds beyond the Federal Government’s budget for this year, but in defending that request, they offered important clues to future US policy from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Iran to Israel-Palestine. 
This morning, I was catching up with the newspapers when a friend/reader Skyped about our recent item, “Dick Cheney’s Fox Interview and the Defence of Torture”: “Surely there must be some date by which I can hope to never ever see Cheney’s face on EA again.”
[This] leaves only the Pakistani military, whichever way it chooses to play the hand with the Americans, as the only significant force in the country with a symbolic and real modicum of power. If Zardari protests this, the prospect of his overthrow emerges. If he accepts his emasculation, he is no more than an irrelevant figurehead. Either way, it’s an effective coup.
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