WASHINGTON - A bipartisan Senate report released yesterday says that former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charges that decisions by those officials led to serious offenses against prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.
The Senate Armed Services Committee report accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the principal architects of the plan to use harsh interrogation techniques on captured fighters and terrorism suspects, rejecting the Bush administration’s contention that the policies originated lower down the command chain.
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The report, released by Senators Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and Republican John McCain of Arizona, and based on a nearly two-year investigation, said that both the policies and resulting controversies tarnished the reputation of the United States and undermined national security. “Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority,” it said [bold added].
The report further asserts that high-level officials not only initiated harsh interrogation techniques [read: torture], but that they “redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality.” It still appears unclear whether any high-level Bush administration officials will be held accountable for their actions.
A symptom of the problem: I am looking at cnn.com and foxnews.com right now. And I can’t find this story.
This interview clip is heartening. President-elect Obama has put himself on record - he will “close Guantanamo” and he will “make sure that we don’t torture.”
The contrast between Obama’s remarks and the moral decay of the Bush administration is striking, and it is just one of the many reasons that November 4 marked a new era of hope for America.
In January, we can all celebrate our new President’s inauguration. And then we must do our job - we must hold him to his words.
As a fan of the television show Law and Order, I know that sometimes detectives Briscoe and Greene cross the line to obtain information or evidence for the prosecutor. One time, Jerry Orbach put a toothpick in a guy’s lock so that the perp couldn’t enter his house and destroy a video before the warrant was issued. In this instance, and in many others like it, the judge found the discovery “tainted” and threw the evidence out. Then Sam Waterson gets really pissed off and give us that poignant, I’m-so-outraged-and-angry-that-I’ll-dramatically-stare-off-into-space expression that he’s mastered.
I’m sure Waterson’s head would explode if he read today’s New York Times which details the goings on within the military commissions in Guantanamo Bay:
“I think they are listening to my telephone calls all the time,” said John A. Chandler, a prominent lawyer in Atlanta and Army veteran who represents six Guantánamo detainees.
Several of the lawyers, including partners at large corporate law firms, said the concerns had changed the way they went about their work apart from Guantánamo cases. A lawyer in Chicago, H. Candace Gorman, said in an affidavit that she was no longer accepting new clients of any type because she could not assure them of confidentiality.
The new filing, by the Center for Constitutional Rights, came in a 2007 lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act in which Guantánamo lawyers are seeking records to determine whether they have been targets of surveillance.
The Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday. But in a legal response in March, its lawyers said they could neither confirm nor deny that detainees’ lawyers had been targets of such surveillance “because doing so would compromise the United States Intelligence Communities sources and methods.” [. . .]
Guantánamo officials say they monitor attorney-client meetings for the safety of lawyers with video cameras but that meeting areas are not wired for sound.
But several lawyers said their clients had told them that shortly after detainees met with lawyers, interrogators had asked the detainees about topics that had been discussed.
But it doesn’t end at eavesdropping on privilged conversations. Evidence or statements procured through torture? A-ok. Habeas Corpus? Never heard of it. Try to time convictions to coincide with US elections to benefit Republicans? Yep.
