Posted on 04/10/2008 6:16:11 PM PDT by SmithL
Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned.
The officials also took care to insulate President Bush from a series of meetings where CIA interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were discussed and ultimately approved.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the meetings described them Thursday to the AP to confirm details first reported by ABC News on Wednesday. The intelligence official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.
Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture.
"If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you'd see a correlation," the former intelligence official said. Those who attended the dozens of meetings agreed that "there'd need to be a legal opinion on the legality of these tactics" before using them on al-Qaida detainees, the former official said.
The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
The White House, Justice and State departments and the CIA refused comment Thursday, as did a spokesman for Tenet. A message for Ashcroft was not immediately returned.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., lambasted what he described as "yet another astonishing disclosure about the Bush administration and its use of torture."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Good.
GOOD! We know there are SOME men with “b*lls” somewhere....
Harsh !!??
Oh My ! How could they ??! Wouldn’t a stern gaze have been enough ?
Sounds like a line from a Monty Python production!
jay rockefeller, is that you?
Good for Dick Cheney, if this is true. I'd vote for him for CINC if he would run.
The dems don't even want to listen to their phone calls though they seem to have no problem reading your thoughts.
The Spanish Inquisition???
So.. lemme get this straight..
Ted K drowns a girl in Chappaquidick in 1968 because he’s a wealthy connected drunk.
Dick Cheney is doing his Vice Presidential duty.
We are talking a manslaughtering Murdering Senator Vs. a Vice President taking some media heat for enforcing the laws of the United States of America in order to protect the World from Terrrorists by agreeing to put a wet face cloth on the face of a Terrorist’s face for 30 seconds in order to gain imperative information.
Ummmm... I must be with Ted, cause he “cares” about my family..
As if I can’t take care of my own Family!
PUHLEEZE!
Who kidnapped the AP's copy editors? Or were the memos issued while the DOJ crowd sang Auld Lang Syne?
Translation: He is an America hating, treasonous b@stard with a desire to weaken the U.S., weaken the Bush administration and leave us vulnerable to attack.
Translation: We left a message with the DOJ switchboard (never mind he no longer works there) just before sending this piece of "journalism" to our sleeping copy editors.
Give me 5 minutes with one of these animals and I’ll redefine “harsh”.
Bin Ladin approved the downing of the twin towers, but hey who’s counting, surely not the RATs!
The debate which should be going on is more complicated:
“Does it violate human rights to take away the desire to violently murder innocent women and children from terrorists?”
That is, there is no human right to violently murder innocent women and children, that much is clear. And in time of war, doing so is a war crime punishable by death, at the discretion of your captor.
So what if you take captured terrorists, who *actually did* commit such acts, and “brainwashed” them so they no longer wanted to commit such acts? Nothing more, just that. No political indoctrination, and they can then lead the same normal life they would have lived had they not committed terrorist acts.
Except they no longer want to violently murder innocent women and children. That is the only change made to their minds through the “brainwashing”.
It is not “shades of A Clockwork Orange”. For such people will still be able to fight soldiers or police at will. All they will no longer want to do is violently murder innocent women and children. It creates a boundary in their mind that they no longer wish to cross.
Is that “torture?”
I say this because I think that from the very start of the War on Terror, this sort of “brainwashing” should have been done *just* to those terrorists who violently attack women and children. They would still be terrorists afterwards, and they would still be filled with burning hate.
But they would no longer want to violently murder innocent women and children.
Would that be “torture?”
Thank you Mr. Vice-President.
As opposed to say....?
THE COMFY CHAIR??????
Good for them.
THREE CHEERS FOR CHENEY!!! A fine Vice President.
This is a problem why?
I wonder how many American lives have been saved by extracting info from these slugs. Of course the left would rather see the bad guys ‘ rights defended, even at the cost of innocent lives.
I agree with Kennedy that waterboarding is inhumane. I would rather take those bastards who want to kill all us infidels. put their testicles in a vice, and squeeze out the info that way!
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