Showing posts with label Guantanamo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guantanamo. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Ve haff veys to maken zem talk

It's been a long, agonizing process, this losing of our national soul.

AND WHAT ONGOING congressional hearings are bringing to the forefront is the extent to which the American government has summoned the Ghost of Third Reich Past in the name of "preventing another 9/11."

Well, given
what's there for the reading in The Washington Post, Osama bin Laden needn't bother. His wisest course -- when the Bush Administration already is doing a fine job of turning America into Amerika, then bringing the whole enterprise to its knees -- would be to just get the hell out of the way.

To wit:
A senior CIA lawyer advised Pentagon officials about the use of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a meeting in late 2002, defending waterboarding and other methods as permissible despite U.S. and international laws banning torture, according to documents released yesterday by congressional investigators.

Torture "is basically subject to perception," CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."

The document, one of two dozen released by a Senate panel investigating how Pentagon officials developed the controversial interrogation program introduced at Guantanamo Bay in late 2002, suggests a larger CIA role in advising Defense Department interrogators than was previously known. By the time of the meeting, the CIA already had used waterboarding, which simulates drowning, on at least one terrorism suspect and was holding high-level al-Qaeda detainees in secret prisons overseas -- actions that Bush administration lawyers had approved.
OF COURSE, all this was perfectly legal and ethical. That's why der Gestapo the CIA was so concerned about keeping the Red Cross' nose out of the government's little enterprise.
One of the most explosive memos was the account of the October 2002 Guantanamo Bay meeting in which the CIA's Fredman joined 10 Defense Department officials and lawyers to discuss how to extract better intelligence from detainees there. Fredman, whose agency had been granted broad latitude by Justice Department lawyers to conduct harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists, listed key considerations for setting a similar program at the Cuban prison. He discussed the pros and cons of videotaping, talked about how to avoid interference by the International Committee of the Red Cross and offered a strong defense of waterboarding.

"If a well-trained individual is used to perform this technique, it can feel like you're drowning," he said, according to the meeting's minutes, which do not provide a verbatim transcript.

Fredman said medical experts should monitor detainees. "If someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of the cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental," he was quoted as saying.

CIA spokesman George Little declined to comment on the remarks attributed to Fredman. "The far more important point is the fact that CIA's terrorist interrogation program has operated on the basis of measured, detailed legal guidance from the Department of Justice," he said. "The agency program, which has been carefully reviewed within our government, has disrupted terrorist plots and saved innocent lives."
IF SOMEONE THINKS he is going to die, it's torture. This is not complicated stuff.

And "measured, detailed legal guidance" is no excuse, particularly when all that lawyerin' is designed to help you get away with using Third Reich techniques in defense of "American values" -- which now apparently include both torture and "the ends justify the means."