Torture report confirms team Bush war crimes

The Senate report contains example after example of why "the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of obtaining accurate information or gaining detainee cooperation." It says: "Multiple CIA detainees fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence . . . on critical intelligence issues including the terrorist threats which the CIA identified as its highest priorities." Yet the CIA continually lied that the EIT "saved lives."

The Legal Mercenaries Should Be Prosecuted

The report says the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) relied on the CIA's numerous misrepresentations when crafting OLC memos authorizing the techniques.

But the report gives OLC lawyers, including Deputy Assistant US Attorney General John Yoo (now a law professor at Berkeley) and Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee (now a federal appellate court judge), free passes by failing to connect the dots leading to their criminal responsibility as war criminals.

The OLC's infamous "torture memos" contain twisted legal reasoning that purported to define torture more narrowly than US law allows. The memos advised high Bush officials how to avoid criminal liability under the War Crimes Act.

Yoo, Bybee and company knew very well that the techniques the CIA sought to employ were illegal. Their August 1, 2002, memo advised that attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap (insult slap), cramped confinement box and the waterboard passed legal muster under the act. They knew these techniques constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, in violation of the Torture Statute, and the Torture Convention.

The Torture Convention is unequivocal: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture." In light of that clear prohibition, the OLC lawyers knew that "necessity" and "self-defense" are not defenses to torture. Whether the CIA was being forthright about the necessity for, or effectiveness of, the techniques was irrelevant to the faulty legal analysis in the torture memos.

Moreover, after the report was released, Cheney told The New York Times: "The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program."

Bush's attorneys general, Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft and Michael Mukasey, who oversaw the DOJ, should be criminally charged, together with the OLC's legal mercenaries.

The report also fails to connect the dots to the Pentagon. In December 2002, Rumsfeld approved interrogation techniques that included the use of dogs, hooding, stress positions, isolation for up to 30 days, 20-hour interrogations, deprivation of light and sound, using scenarios to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family, and using a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation.

And the report gives short shrift to the extraordinary rendition program, where detainees were illegally sent to other countries to be tortured. The report refers to "renditions," which are conducted with judicial process. But detainees were rendered to black sites in Syria, Libya and Egypt in order to avoid legal accountability.

No Impunity