CIA lied to Congress

In some ways, this really isn't surprising. From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, has told the House Intelligence Committee in closed-door testimony that the C.I.A. concealed “significant actions” from Congress from 2001 until late last month, seven Democratic committee members said.

In a June 26 letter to Mr. Panetta discussing his testimony, Democrats said that the agency had “misled members” of Congress for eight years about the classified matters, which the letter did not disclose. “This is similar to other deceptions of which we are aware from other recent periods,” said the letter, made public late Wednesday by Representative Rush D. Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, one of the signers.

In an interview, Mr. Holt declined to reveal the nature of the C.I.A.’s alleged deceptions,. But he said, “We wouldn’t be doing this over a trivial matter.”

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Silvestre Reyes, Democrat of Texas, referred to Mr. Panetta’s disclosure in a letter to the committee’s ranking Republican, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, Congressional Quarterly reported on Wednesday. Mr. Reyes wrote that the committee “has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one occasion) was affirmatively lied to.”

As I've said, I'm not surprised that the CIA lied to Congress from 2001 onwards. You have to go back to the individual sitting in the White House in 2001 that initiated this cult of lying--we're talking former President George W. Bush here. The Bush administration lied to Congress and the American people on just about everything--the WMDs in Iraq, intelligence failures and the reasons sending the U.S. into war in Iraq, the secret prisons, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding and torture, the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the U.S. attorney firings--the list just goes on. When President Barack Obama came into the White House of this year, I'd say that the CIA continued to lie to Congress because the Obama administration wanted to sweep the Bush administration's transgressions under a rug. I would say that President Obama doesn't want congressional investigations into the Bush administration for fears that a future Republican president may demand investigations into the Obama administration. In other words, it is politics as usual, and forget whether serious laws were broken by former leaders and public officials.

And we're seeing politics as usual continuing on in the NY Times story:

In a related development, President Obama threatened to veto the pending Intelligence Authorization Bill if it included a provision that would allow information about covert actions to be given to the entire House and Senate Intelligence Committees, rather than the so-called Gang of Eight — the Democratic and Republican leaders of both houses of Congress and the two Intelligence Committees.

A White House statement released on Wednesday said the proposed expansion of briefings would undermine “a long tradition spanning decades of comity between the branches regarding intelligence matters.” Democrats have complained that under President George W. Bush, entire programs were hidden from most committee members for years.

This is frickin' bullcrap on President Obama's part. The Obama administration doesn't want the CIA to disclose their activities, and their lying, to the entire congressional intelligence committees. So they make up this dog and pony show of saying that the CIA provided "a long tradition spanning decades of comity" to the congressional intelligence panels. That may have been true in the previous decades, but I can't recall a time when the CIA, and a previous presidential administration, engaged in such egregious lying to Congress--the Nixon administration's lying seems like child's play compared to what the Bush administration did. In this case, President Obama does not want to provide a fuller disclosure of intelligence matters to Congress, but would rather keep the status quoe of informing the congressional leaders, rather than the full committees.

Of course, this brings up another problem. Who is to say that a future presidential administration will probably order the CIA to continue lying to Congress--whether it is the congressional leaders, or the full intelligence committee members? If a future president, or an executive department, is going to lie to Congress about anything, then Congress is pretty much screwed here. There is no recourse that Congress has to punish such liars in the executive branch, with the exception of cutting off money funding such executive departments. Cutting off CIA funding may be a powerful punishment for the CIA's lying to Congress, but in today's polarizing political climate, that is not going to happen.

Which brings us to the polarizing political climate of today. Continuing with the NY Times story:

The question of the C.I.A.’s candor with the Congressional oversight committees has been hotly disputed since Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the agency of failing to disclose in a 2002 briefing that it had used waterboarding against a terrorism suspect. Ms. Pelosi said the agency routinely misled Congress, though she later said she intended to fault the Bush administration rather than career intelligence officials.

Since then, Republicans have called Ms. Pelosi’s complaint an unwarranted attack on the integrity of counterterrorism officers and have demanded an investigation. Democrats have rebuffed the demand.

In a statement Wednesday night, a C.I.A. spokesman, George Little, noted that the agency “took the initiative to notify the oversight committees” about the past failures. He said the agency and Mr. Panetta “believe it is vital to keep the Congress fully and currently informed.”

A couple of points here. First, the CIA is continuing to lie to Congress about previously lying to Congress. You just have to love the statement about the CIA taking the initiative to "notify the oversight committees" about the department's previous lies to Congress, but then implicitly rejecting the congressional Democrats demands for CIA director Leon Panetta to explain his lying to Congress for the past nine years, saying that Panetta believes it vital "to keep Congress fully and currently informed." Talk about doublespeak here. Panetta is not going to give squat to Congress.

But the more interesting point was the GOP attacks against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, when Pelosi complained about the CIA lying to her back in May, 2009. Republican leaders were demanding that Pelosi retract her accusations that the CIA lied to her. Former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich called for Pelosi's resignation. House Minority Leader John Boehner demanded that Pelosi should apologize for her accusations. Even CIA Director Leon Panetta jumped into the fray, saying in a May 15, 2009 message to agency employees, which was released to the public, "Let me be clear. It is not our policy or practice to mislead Congress...That is against our laws and our values." Now it turns out that Pelosi was right about the CIA lying to her, the GOP was wrong in demanding Pelosi to retract her statements, apologize, or resign, and Panetta continued his lying, which furthered the GOP attacks against Pelosi. This was partisan politics, where the Republicans found an opportunity to smear Pelosi on this CIA lying--regardless of the facts. Now that it turns out that Pelosi was right on the CIA lying to her, the GOP has suddenly turned quiet, fearing that any criticism would now undermine their smear campaign against Pelosi. And you can bet that every GOP politician will never apologize to Pelosi for their own smears against her.

Bush approved "Principles" meetings on torture techniques

Back in April 10, 2008, I posted a story about a damning ABC News investigation revealing that "Principle" members of the Bush administration met and discussed the use of torture on al Qaeda prisoners. The Principles included "Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft." You can watch the ABC News investigation here on YouTube:



Well, now we have a huge update on this story. According to the Washington Post:

CRAWFORD, Tex., April 11 -- President Bush said Friday that he was aware his top national security advisers had discussed the details of harsh interrogation tactics to be used on detainees.

Bush also said in an interview with ABC News that he approved of the meetings, which were held as the CIA began to prepare for a secret interrogation program that included waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and other coercive techniques.

"Well, we started to connect the dots, in order to protect the American people" by learning what various detainees knew, Bush said in the interview at the presidential ranch here. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

The remarks underscore the extent to which the top officials were directly involved in setting the controversial interrogation policies.

Bush suggested in the interview that no one should be surprised that his senior advisers, including Vice President Cheney, would discuss details of the interrogation program. "I told the country we did that," Bush said. "And I also told them it was legal. We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it."

President Bush knew about the Principles' meetings. He knew that they were discussing torture techniques, and more importantly, he approved of the use of torture against al Qaeda prisoners. What is even more amazing is that Bush claims it is legal for the U.S. to conduct torture sessions on al Qaeda prisoners because Bush said so. It is a rather circular argument that goes back to the almost dictatorial powers that Bush claims to have because he is the Commander-in-Chief, fighting an endless Great War on Terror, and that Congress gave him these dictatorial powers after the September 11th attacks. There is only one law here, and that law is whatever President Bush wants the law to be. And with Congress closely divided between the Democrats and Republicans, there is no way for Congress to reassert itself, through either investigating the Bush administration's criminal activities through subpoena power, or through impeachment of the president and his top advisers. It is bad enough for the president to knowingly approve of such illegal activities that his men are doing on his behalf. But when President Bush publicly states that he approves of such illegal activities that his men are engaging in, it shows just how much contempt Bush has for the law.

Finally, there is one disturbing detail in this WaPost story:

The Post reported that the methods discussed included open-handed slapping, the threat of live burial and waterboarding. The threat of live burial was rejected, according to an official familiar with the meetings.

To think that the threat of live burial was even discussed in these meetings is even shocking to me. If burying a person alive--or even threatening to bury a person alive-- is not torture, then what is torture? And did President Bush even know that this technique was discussed by his top officials? The details coming out from these White House torture meetings make the Bush administration seem like a tin-pot, bloodthirsty, banana republic dictatorship. It just keeps getting worst.

I can't wait for this nightmare to end.

History will not judge kindly the Bush "Principles" approval of torture techniques

I saw this story through the Carpetbagger Report, with the source story coming from ABC News. ABC News has published a damning investigation, reporting that senior Bush administration officials signed off on the use of torture--especially waterboarding--on al Qaeda prisoners in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. From ABC News:

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

You can watch the ABC News video of this story here on YouTube:



Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, George Tenant, Colin Powell, and John Ashcroft attended these meetings in the White House Situation Room to discuss whether the CIA could use torture on al Qaeda prisoners. What even more surprising is that the meetings were so detailed to the point of redefining torture into the more politically correct phrase "enhanced interrogation techniques" while also discussing exactly what those techniques would constitute from slapping to waterboarding. No matter how you slice it, the Bush administration approved the use of torture on al Qaeda prisoners. And what is more damning is that the approval for these techniques came from these top "Principles" in the Bush administration. They approved them continuously, as Tenant kept asking the Principles for authorization to continue torture sessions on even more al Qaeda prisoners:

According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization for specific techniques. Agents, worried about overstepping their boundaries, would await guidance in particularly complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources said.

Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas.

"It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time," said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. "They'd say, 'We've got so and so. This is the plan.'"

Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved.

"These discussions weren't adding value," a source said. "Once you make a policy decision to go beyond what you used to do and conclude it's legal, (you should) just tell them to implement it."

The Principles continued signing off of more CIA torture sessions to al Qaeda prisoners got so routine, that even Attorney General John Ashcroft was worried the direction the Bush administration's torture policy was heading:

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

History will not judge this kindly. It is rather disturbing that someone as conservative as John Ashcroft would realize just how immoral the Bush administration has become with the continued approval of these cruel and barbaric torture sessions. We have insane criminals running this White House, and they will not stop the inhuman use of torture and endless war in Iraq to continue their own bloodthirsty dreams of imperial glory.

John Yoo torture memo publicly released

This is from The Washington Post:

The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.

The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce "an extreme effect" calculated to "cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality."

[....]

Sent to the Pentagon's general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John C. Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president's inherent wartime powers.

"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote. "In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."

Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a "national and international version of the right to self-defense," Yoo wrote. He also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations -- that it must "shock the conscience" -- that the Bush administration advocated for years.

What is scary about this memo is that the president can do anything he wants, as long as the president is commander-in-chief during wartime. This memo basically authorizes U.S. interrogators to torture prisoners, and are protected from any sort of war crimes prosecution as a result of such torture. It has been the basis for this Bush administration's argument for continuing their use of torture against prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. And since we are in an endless Great War on Terrorism, the president can continue abusing these supposed dictatorial powers indefinitely.

It is just mind-boggling.

You can read the entire torture memo here with Part One and Part Two.

CIA destroyed tapes of terrorist interrogations

This is off The Washington Post:

The CIA destroyed videotapes in 2005 showing the use of harsh interrogation methods on two terrorism suspects because the agency feared the tapes could be leaked to the public and reveal the identities of the questioners, the CIA director told employees today.

CIA Director Michael Hayden also said that leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees at the time were informed about the existence of the tapes and about the agency's plans to destroy them.

"The tapes posed a serious security risk," Hayden wrote in a message to CIA employees. "Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al-Qaida and its sympathizers." The tapes were destroyed in November 2005 on orders of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who was then the CIA's director of clandestine operations, according to senior intelligence officials. That was the same month that The Washington Post revealed the existence of CIA secret prisons overseas holding "high-value" terrorists.

For once, Hayden is right--the interrogation tapes did pose a serious security risk. Where Hayden is completely wrong is that the tapes did not pose a security risk to the country, but rather a security risk to the Bush administration's insistence on using torture on these prisoners. These tapes were destroyed the same month that the WaPost revealed the existence of these CIA secret prisons. You have to wonder what was going on in those secret prisons--torture? This was a CYA on the Bush administration's part in destroying evidence of this administration using torture on terror suspects.

Disgusting.

Panel of experts criticize Bush interrogation methods

This is off The New York Times:

WASHINGTON, May 29 — As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.

The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects.

[....]

Some of the study participants argue that interrogation should be restructured using lessons from many fields, including the tricks of veteran homicide detectives, the persuasive techniques of sophisticated marketing and models from American history.

[....]

But in meetings with intelligence officials and in a 325-page initial report completed in December, the researchers have pressed a more practical critique: there is little evidence, they say, that harsh methods produce the best intelligence.

“There’s an assumption that often passes for common sense that the more pain imposed on someone, the more likely they are to comply,” said Randy Borum, a psychologist at the University of South Florida who, like several of the study’s contributors, is a consultant for the Defense Department.

The Bush administration is nearing completion of a long-delayed executive order that will set new rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. The order is expected to ban the harshest techniques used in the past, including the simulated drowning tactic known as waterboarding, but to authorize some methods that go beyond those allowed in the military by the Army Field Manual.

President Bush has insisted that those secret “enhanced” techniques are crucial, and he is far from alone. The notion that turning up pressure and pain on a prisoner will produce valuable intelligence is a staple of popular culture from the television series “24” to the recent Republican presidential debate, where some candidates tried to outdo one another in vowing to get tough on captured terrorists. A 2005 Harvard study supported the selective use of “highly coercive” techniques.

But some of the experts involved in the interrogation review, called “Educing Information,” say that during World War II, German and Japanese prisoners were effectively questioned without coercion.

“It far outclassed what we’ve done,” said Steven M. Kleinman, a former Air Force interrogator and trainer, who has studied the World War II program of interrogating Germans. The questioners at Fort Hunt, Va., “had graduate degrees in law and philosophy, spoke the language flawlessly,” and prepared for four to six hours for each hour of questioning, said Mr. Kleinman, who wrote two chapters for the December report.

Mr. Kleinman, who worked as an interrogator in Iraq in 2003, called the post-Sept. 11 efforts “amateurish” by comparison to the World War II program, with inexperienced interrogators who worked through interpreters and had little familiarity with the prisoners’ culture.

The Intelligence Science Board study has a chapter on the long history of police interrogations, which it suggests may contain lessons on eliciting accurate confessions. And Mr. Borum, the psychologist, said modern marketing may be a source of relevant insights into how to influence a prisoner’s willingness to provide information.

“We have a whole social science literature on persuasion,” Mr. Borum said. “It’s mostly on how to get a person to buy a certain brand of toothpaste. But it certainly could be useful in improving interrogation.”

Robert F. Coulam, a research professor and attorney at Simmons College and a study participant, said that the government’s most vigorous work on interrogation to date has been in seeking legal justifications for harsh tactics. Even today, he said, “there’s nothing like the mobilization of effort and political energy that was put into relaxing the rules” governing interrogation.

It is interesting that this NY Times story came out pretty much on the same day as Andrew Sullivan's Verschärfte Vernehmung story showing disturbing similarities between the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation" techniques, and the torture techniques used by Nazi Germany. I fear that we have entering a period where our fragile democracy is being systematically destroyed by men who crave only raw, totalitarian power, but then show themselves to be incompetent in solving this country's problems once they have achieved that power.

'"Verschärfte Vernehmung"

I found this Andrew Sullivan story on The Atlantic:

The phrase "Verschärfte Vernehmung" is German for "enhanced interrogation". Other translations include "intensified interrogation" or "sharpened interrogation". It's a phrase that appears to have been concocted in 1937, to describe a form of torture that would leave no marks, and hence save the embarrassment pre-war Nazi officials were experiencing as their wounded torture victims ended up in court. The methods, as you can see above, are indistinguishable from those described as "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the president. As you can see from the Gestapo memo, moreover, the Nazis were adamant that their "enhanced interrogation techniques" would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan.

Sullivan lists example after example of similar torture techniques the Bush administration uses with those same techniques used by Nazi Germany. Even more astounding is that the defensive arguments for using these techniques by the Nazis have been resurrected by the Bush administration:

In Norway, we actually have a 1948 court case that weighs whether "enhanced interrogation" using the methods approved by president Bush amounted to torture. The proceedings are fascinating, with specific reference to the hypothermia used in Gitmo, and throughout interrogation centers across the field of conflict. The Nazi defense of the techniques is almost verbatim that of the Bush administration...

Here's a document from Norway's 1948 war-crimes trials detailing the prosecution of Nazis convicted of "enhanced interrogation techniques" in the Second World War. Money quote from the cases of three Germans convicted of war crimes for "enhanced interrogation":

Between 1942 and 1945, Bruns used the method of "verschärfte Vernehmung" on 11 Norwegian citizens. This method involved the use of various implements of torture, cold baths and blows and kicks in the face and all over the body. Most of the prisoners suffered for a considerable time from the injuries received during those interrogations.

Between 1942 and 1945, Schubert gave 14 Norwegian prisoners "verschärfte Vernehmung," using various instruments of torture and hitting them in the face and over the body. Many of the prisoners suffered for a considerable time from the effects of injuries they received.

On 1st February, 1945, Clemens shot a second Norwegian prisoner from a distance of 1.5 metres while he was trying to escape. Between 1943 and 1945, Clemens employed the method of " verschäfte Vernehmung " on 23 Norwegian prisoners. He used various instruments of torture and cold baths. Some of the prisoners continued for a considerable time to suffer from injuries received at his hands.

[....]

The victims, by the way, were not in uniform. And the Nazis tried to argue, just as John Yoo did, that this made torturing them legit. The victims were paramilitary Norwegians, operating as an insurgency, against an occupying force. And the torturers had also interrogated some prisoners humanely. But the argument, deployed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Nazis before them, didn't wash with the court.

Sullivan concludes with this devastating comment:

Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.

Read the entire article. What I find amazing here is that the Bush administration is reiterating the same torture policies and arguments defending these policies that the Nazis used over fifty years ago. President Bush is taking a page from the Nazi playbook on creating a totalitarian state, where individuals have no more freedoms, where illegal domestic spying is warranted for the protection of The State, where torture is used to elicit confessions, and where war is a constant reminder to the public for the The State's need for the expansion of absolute power. This Bush administration doesn't believe in the rule of law--this administration believes itself to be above the law. It is what makes President Bush a destructive individual to our democracy.

Bush administration: 'No legal rights' for detainees

In this June 27, 2006 file photo, reviewed by U.S. military officials, a detainee, name, nationality, and facial identification not permitted, sits with a drink in a styrofoam cup as other detainees sit near him, within the grounds of Camp Delta military-run prison, at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba. Guantanamo Bay prisoners could soon lose access to their lawyers _ one of their only contacts with the outside world _ because of a new law that eliminates their right to challenge their detention in civilian courts, the lawyers fear. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, FILE)

Well, this isn't too surprising. This is from USA Today:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is taking a hard line on whether prisoners at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a right to lawyers to help them file lawsuits challenging their detentions.

In court papers filed during the past two weeks, the Justice Department has insisted that the detainees have "no legal rights," especially the right to counsel.

But the administration says that it will grant defense lawyers access to detainees if the lawyers consent to restrictions that include undergoing body searches and allowing the military to monitor their conversations with their clients.

The legal arguments made by both sides are reminiscent of those they have made for more than two years as they argued whether President Bush can hold "enemy combatants" without charges or access to court for as long as the war on terrorism lasts.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that the president's war powers are not "a blank check." The court said that a U.S. citizen held in a Navy brig in South Carolina and nearly 600 suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives held in Cuba have a right to contest their detentions.

Justice Department lawyers accuse the detainees' attorneys of stretching the Supreme Court's ruling "way out of proportion." They say the Supreme Court decided only whether federal courts have authority to review challenges by the detainees and did not address whether captives have a right to lawyers.

Attorneys for the detainees accuse the administration of doing an end-run around the Supreme Court. "One would never know that this case had just been to the Supreme Court of the United States, where the government made — and lost — virtually the same arguments it now recycles here," they wrote.

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly in Washington plans to hear arguments Monday on the dispute.

So now we know the Bush administration's case for the Gitmo detainees--they have no rights! They have no rights for a trial. They practically have no rights for an attorney, since the Bush administration is willing to grant the detainees an attorney but only on the condition that the administration can review the notes and conversations between the detainee and attorney. This is just sickening:

[The] administration says that it will grant the lawyers access to their clients if they pass and pay for background checks for "secret" security clearances, which the defense lawyers need to review classified documents pertaining to their clients.

Under rules created by the Pentagon, the military will search lawyers before and after they meet with their clients, review any notes that attorneys take and record conversations between lawyers and some of the detainees.

Justice Department lawyers say restrictions are needed to protect national security. But the detainees' lawyers say the policy is an assault on the attorney-client privilege and will "chill" their relationships with the captives.

Talk about a sham here--this is supposed to protect us in the war on terror? This is outright authoritarianism by the Bush White House--lawyers must pass and pay for background checks for security clearances, be subjected to searches (Strip searches perhaps?), and that the state can review any notes and record conversations between the attorneys and their clients? This is not in the interest of fighting terrorism--this is a combination of the Bush administration's CYA for the illegal imprisoning and torturing of terror suspects without any legal recourse, and then trying to impose police-state powers within the United States, after the fact. This has nothing to do with terrorism. If these suspects are guilty of terrorism, then put the terror suspects on a public trial, show us all the evidence of their guilt or innocence--and that includes the so-called secret evidence that the Bush White House refuses to divulge due to "national security," and then have the subjects judged according to the evidence. However, the real reason the Bush administration refuses to even allow these detainees any legal rights, is probably because these detainees were picked up by U.S. forces in the wrong place at the wrong time, or that a number of these suspected terrorists were sold to the U.S. by the Afghan warlords, or Pakistani tribesmen, for cash. And now after four years of captivity, and possibly torture, the Bush administration is worried that the release of these suspects may cause them to turn to terrorism because of their incarceration.

This is another complete failure of the Bush administration's extremism has made a bad situation of fighting against terrorism even worst. It is never-ending.

Let's all waterboard

I found this through both YouTube, and through The Dead Guy. And yes, it is wickedly funny--perfect for a weekend snark:

Cheney's Remarks on Dunking Terrorism Suspects Fuels Debate

This is off The Washington Post:

Vice President Cheney said this week that dunking terrorism suspects in water during questioning was a "no-brainer," prompting complaints from human rights advocates that he was endorsing the use of a controversial technique known as waterboarding on prisoners held by the United States.

In an interview Tuesday with Scott Hennen, a conservative radio show host from Fargo, N.D., Cheney agreed with Hennen's assertion that "a dunk in water" may yield valuable intelligence from terrorism suspects. He also referred to information gleaned from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the captured architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but stopped short of explicitly saying what techniques were used.

"Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" Hennen asked.

"Well, it's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said, "but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president for torture. We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in."

Uh-oh! Looks like Cheney put his foot in his mouth. Dunking a terror suspect's head in the water is a "no-brainer" for getting valuable intelligence. But that's okay--a dunk in the water is not considered torture by Cheney.

However, Cheney's remark has certainly angered human rights activists. Amnesty International USA's Executive Director Larry Cox issued the following statement:

"What's really a no-brainer is that no U.S. official, much less a Vice President, should champion torture. Vice President Cheney's advocacy of water-boarding sets a new human rights low at a time when human rights is already scraping the bottom of the Bush administration barrel.

The U.S. Department of Defense specifically prohibited water- boarding in its newly issued Army Field Manual. U.S. Senators have stated clearly that water-boarding is unacceptable.

This administration aims at a radical break with our country's proud human rights tradition. The America we believe in does not torture people."

Human Rights Watch issued the following comment:

Cheney’s comments on the legality of waterboarding contradict the views of the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Defense Department, as well as fundamental principles of international law, and could come back to haunt the United States if not corrected by the Bush administration, Human Rights Watch warned.

“If Iran or Syria detained an American, Cheney is saying that it would be perfectly fine for them to hold that American’s head under water until he nearly drowns, if that’s what they think they need to do to save Iranian or Syrian lives,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

These are the responses from two of the big human rights organizations. Cheney's comments have also been picked up in the blogosphere--Carpetbagger Report, Mahablog, The Democratic Daily, Talking Points Memo, and even The Huffington Post--just to name a few here.

With all this criticism coming up on Cheney's water-boarding comments, the Bush administration needed to go into campaign-spin mode. Continuing with the WaPost article:

Asked about Cheney's comments this morning, President Bush said: "This country doesn't torture. We're not going to torture. We will interrogate people we pick up off the battlefield to determine whether or not they've got information that'd be helpful to protect the country."

At the daily White House briefing, White House spokesman Tony Snow was peppered with questions about what Cheney thought the "dunk in the water" question meant and why, in turn, he considered the "dunk in the water" technique a "no brainer."

"Let me give you the no brainers here," Snow said. " . . . No brainer No. 1 is that we don't torture. No brainer No. 2: We don't break the law -- our own or international law. No brainer No. 3: the vice president doesn't give away questioning techniques. No. 4, the administration does believe in legal questioning techniques of known killers whose questioning can, in fact, be used to save American lives."

Snow said his understanding of Cheney's comments came from a conversation with the vice president's spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride.

"The vice president says he was talking in general terms about a questioning program that is legal to save American lives," Snow said, "and he was not referring to waterboarding."

You've got to love the spin-mode here. President Bush just keeps denying that the United States does not torture--even after Cheney has said that it is a "no-brainer" for dunking suspects’ heads into water. Tony Snow goes down his own "no-brainer" list: We don't torture. We don't break international law. The vice president doesn't give away questioning techniques--wait a minute, didn't Vice President Cheney say it is a "no-brainer" to dunk suspected terrorists’ heads into water? Isn't that a questioning technique? And finally Snow concludes his "no-brainer" list with it is okay to use "legal" questioning techniques against terrorists if such techniques will save American lives. So does dunking a terrorist's head in the water amount to a legal questioning technique? The vice president believes so--it is a "no-brainer" to him. Of course, the Bush administration has "repeatedly declined to say which techniques they believe are permitted under the new [Anti-terrorism] law and have steadfastly declined to discuss methods used in the past." So even here the Bush administration is contradicting itself, where the President and Press Secretary Snow claims the U.S. doesn't torture, Vice President Cheney considers dunking a terrorist's head into water as a "no-brainer" for questioning and torture techniques, and yet the administration refuses to discuss whatever torture or questioning methods they are currently using, or have used in the past.

But it gets so much better here. Continuing again with the WaPost article:

Snow said his understanding of Cheney's comments came from a conversation with the vice president's spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride.

"The vice president says he was talking in general terms about a questioning program that is legal to save American lives," Snow said, "and he was not referring to waterboarding."

"What could 'dunk in the water' refer to if not water boarding?" Snow was asked during the briefing.

" . . . I will let you draw your own conclusions," Snow said.

"I'm asking for an explanation about what 'dunk in the water' could mean," the reporter said.

"How about a dunk in the water?" Snow said.

"So 'dunk in the water' means what? -- we have a pool now at Guantanamo, and they go swimming?" the reporter said.

"Are you doing stand up [comedy]?" Snow said, to laughter in the briefing room.

In one sense, you just have to laugh at the absurdity of the Bush administration here. The president denies that the U.S. is torturing. The press secretary asks the reporters what they think torture means, and the vice president flaps his mouth, which gets the administration into trouble in the first place--with less than two weeks to go before the elections. I can't even get angry here because I'm watching a Bush White House that is staffed by clowns. The sad thing is that while these clowns are yucking it up, the waterboarding torture continues on in Gitmo, and other American-controlled prisons in Iraq and possibly Afghanistan.

It is a no-brainer all right.