[Vision2020] "Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses"

Tue Dec 23 08:41:01 PST 2014

The Obama administration has already prosecuted someone related to the CIA
torture program - John Kiriakou, the CIA whistleblower that leaked
information about the program to the press.

Shows you where their priorities lie, I guess.

Paul

On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 1:37 AM, Saundra Lund <v2020 at ssl1.fastmail.fm>
wrote:

> Hi Rose,
>
>
>
> I completely agree, although I have no faith there will ever be
> prosecutions.  All I have to do is listen to/read torture apologists, of
> whom there are apparently no shortage.  It is horrifying to me to see how
> many “patriotic Americans” think that some imaginary end justifies
> unconscionable means.
>
>
>
> I believe history will absolutely show the torture of terrorism suspects
> to be one of the darkest chapters in America’s history.
>
>
>
>
>
> Saundra
>
> Moscow, ID
>
>
>
> Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
>
> ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto:
> vision2020-bounces at moscow.com] *On Behalf Of *Rosemary Huskey
> *Sent:* Monday, December 22, 2014 5:45 PM
> *To:* vision2020 at moscow.com
> *Subject:* [Vision2020] "Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses"
>
>
> It is my profound hope that prosecutions will soon begin to take place
> starting with the cowards and sadists listed below. However, I have little
> hope that President Obama has the integrity or the courage to initiate the
> appropriate legal process.  Rose HuskeyThe Opinion Pages
> <http://www.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html> | Editorial Prosecute
> Torturers and Their Bosses
>
> By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
> <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/opinion/editorialboard.html>DEC. 21,
> 2014
>
> Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to
> justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an
> official government program conceived and carried out in the years after
> the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
>
> He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s
> destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone
> beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But
> the investigation did not lead
> <http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/statement-attorney-general-eric-holder-closure-investigation-interrogation-certain-detainees>
> to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not
> filed.
>
> Mr. Obama has said
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/12/us/politics/12inquire.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&>
> multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking
> backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation
> cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally
> and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false
> patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the
> highest levels of government on down.
>
> Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive
> summary
> <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/cia-torture-report-document.html>
> of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt
> about their depravity and illegality
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/opinion/the-senate-report-on-the-cias-torture-and-lies.html>:
> In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding
> <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-10/rectal-feeding-of-detainees-called-abuse-with-guise-of-treatment.html>,”
> scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in
> coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In
> November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of
> “suspected hypothermia.”
>
> These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law
> <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2340A>, which defines
> <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2340> torture as the
> intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.”
> They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture
> <http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html>, the international treaty that the
> United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of
> torture.
>
> So it is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists
> <http://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-b-mukasey-the-cia-interrogations-followed-the-law-1418773648>
> are desperate to call these acts anything but torture, which they clearly
> were. As the report reveals, these claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A.
> officials admitted <http://justsecurity.org/18221/knew-illegal/> at the
> time that what they intended to do was illegal.
>
> In July 2002, C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency
> needed to use “more aggressive methods” of interrogation that would
> “otherwise be prohibited by the torture statute.” They asked the department
> to promise not to prosecute those who used these methods. When the
> department refused, they shopped around for the answer they wanted. They
> got it from the ideologically driven lawyers in the Office of Legal
> Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a legal foundation for the methods.
> Government officials now rely on the memos as proof that they sought and
> received legal clearance for their actions. But the report changes the
> game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good faith.
>
> No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the
> report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be
> held accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full
> and independent criminal investigation.
>
> The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch are to give
> Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. a letter Monday calling for appointment of
> a special prosecutor to investigate what appears increasingly to be “a vast
> criminal conspiracy, under color of law, to commit torture and other
> serious crimes.”
>
> The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be
> held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as
> hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a
> new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions
> of a former president.
>
> But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick
> Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A.
> director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal
> Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos
> <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/international/24MEMO-GUIDE.html>. There are
> many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the
> C.I.A. official who ordered
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/washington/03web-intel.html> the
> destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/us/politics/cia-on-path-to-torture-chose-haste-over-analysis-.html>
> the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.
>
> One would expect Republicans who have gone hoarse braying about Mr.
> Obama’s executive overreach to be the first to demand accountability, but
> with one notable exception
> <http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2014/12/09/?entry=6819>,
> Senator John McCain, they have either fallen silent or actively
> <http://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-b-mukasey-the-cia-interrogations-followed-the-law-1418773648>
> defended <https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/542356968737107968> the
> indefensible
> <http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/congressman-senate-report-not-torture-just-people-having-to?utm_term=4ldqpia&bftw=pol>.
> They cannot even point to any results
> <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/08/world/does-torture-work-the-cias-claims-and-what-the-committee-found.html>:
> Contrary to repeated claims by the C.I.A., the report concluded that “at no
> time” did any of these techniques yield intelligence that averted a terror
> attack. And at least 26 detainees were later determined to have been “wrongfully
> held
> <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/world/cia-torture-report-document.html>
> .”
>
> Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about
> ensuring that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility
> to rebuke torture by other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we
> now know the distance officials in the executive branch went to
> rationalize, and conceal, the crimes they wanted to commit. The question is
> whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to
> have perpetual immunity for their actions.
>
>
>
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