Get the complete transcript of this interview:

British Lawmaker David Davis Challenges US Threats to Suppress Evidence of CIA Torture

See the video from last week of Amy Goodman's interview with this anti-torture right-wing conservative Brittish MP:

British MP Blasts U.S. Efforts to Keep Evidence Hidden in Gitmo Torture Case

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Stephen Colbert on Chuck Todd and torture investigations

Amazingly, reports that Eric Holder is considering commencing an investigation into Bush-era torture crimes has created extreme consternation in multiple Beltway circles despite how narrow and limited those investigations would be.  As I wrote last week, numerous reports indicate that Holder wants to replicate the Abu Ghraib travesty by investigating only low-level interrogators who exceeded the torture limits approved by John Yoo and George Bush, and not investigate the high-level policy makers who instituted the criminal torture regime or the DOJ lawyers who authorized it. 

Since then, the Newsweek reporter who first printed what DOJ officials told him about Holder's intentions, Daniel Klaidman, confirmed in an interview on The Young Turks that Holder intends to confine any investigations only to "rogue" interrogators who exceeded John Yoo's torture permission slips while shielding high-level Bush officials who acted in accordance with Yoo's decrees.  Proving yet again that there is nothing more difficult than satirizing our rotted political culture, here is what I wrote about Holder's intentions last week:

Holder's plan, at least at the moment, is -- from the start -- to confine the prosecutors' authority to investigate to CIA agents who went beyond what John Yoo and George Bush decreed could be done ("he used more water than Yoo said he could"; "he tied him up for longer than Yoo authorized"; "the room was colder and the freezing water icier than Yoo allowed"). At least if these reports are accurate (and, for several reasons, that's unclear), anyone who "merely" did what John Yoo said was legal -- meaning everyone who matters -- will be shielded and immunized...

Read the complete Salon.com article here

Six Questions for Cynthia Smith on the Legality of Force-feeding at Guantánamo
By Luke Mitchell

The apparent suicide Monday (6-1-09) of thirty-one-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, who had been protesting his long imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay by refusing to eat, has brought U.S. force-feed policy back into the news. Many human rights organizations have called for an end to force-feeding, which as practiced at Guantánamo amounts to torture. In MayApril, for an article to be published in the July Harper's Magazine, I attempted to query Dr. Ward Casscells, then the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, about how he might modify that policy since Barack Obama had become president. Cynthia Smith, a Pentagon spokesperson, responded to my written queries (which I have edited here for length) under the requirement that I attribute the answers to her and not Casscells. At the time of the interview, at least thirty prisoners at Guantánamo were being restrained and fed via enteral tube.

Here are the questions by Harper's senior editor Luke Mitchell

A federal judge has ruled that John Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer who wrote crucial memorandums justifying harsh interrogation techniques, will have to answer in court to accusations that his work led to a prisoner's being tortured and deprived of his constitutional rights. The government had asked Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco to dismiss the case filed by Jose Padilla, an American citizen who spent more than three years in a military brig as an enemy combatant. Judge White denied most elements of Mr. Yoo's motion and quoted a passage from the Federalist Papers that in times of war, nations, to be more safe, "at length become willing to run the risk of being less free."
http://tinyurl.com/mlgbpj

Meanwhile in a second case in the 9th Circuit Court, the Obama administration has increased its defense of secrecy surrounding an alleged CIA program of torture flight, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/13/BAD5186LUA.DTL.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/us/politics/21obama.html

The letters to the editorial page of the Philadelphia Inquirer are on fire. People are writing in, overwhelmingly opposed to the newspaper's hiring of John Yoo as a columnist, the former Justice Department lawyer who helped write what's come to be known as the torture memo that claimed the treatment of prisoners amounted to torture only if it caused the same level of pain as "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/18/philadelphia_inquirer_hires_torture_memo_author

New York Times

April 19, 2009
Editorial

The Torturers' Manifesto

To read the four newly released memos on prisoner interrogation written by George W. Bush's Justice Department is to take a journey into depravity.

Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect -- all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors' statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country's most basic values.

Medical personnel committed a "gross breach of medical ethics" by taking part in torture in Guantánamo, a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross document has revealed.

The 40-page confidential report, written in 2007, describes how medical staff working for the CIA monitored prisoners' vital signs to make sure they did not drown while being subjected to waterboarding, during which water is poured over a cloth placed over a person's nose and mouth.

Medical personnel were also said to be present when prisoners were shackled in a "stress standing position". The detainees were "monitored by health personnel who in some instances recommended stopping the method of ill-treatment, or recommended its continuation, but with adjustments", according to the report.

The Red Cross concluded: "The alleged participation of health personnel in the interrogation process and, either directly or indirectly, in the infliction of ill-treatment constituted a gross breach of medical ethics and, in some cases, amounted to participation in torture and/or cruel inhuman or degrading treatment."

Today, London-based journalist and author of "The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison," releases the first definitive list of the 779 prisoners held in the United States prison of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The list, which is the result of three years' research and writing about Guantánamo, provides details of the 533 prisoners who have been released, and includes, for the first time ever, accurate dates for their release. It also provides details of the 241 prisoners who are still held, including the 59 prisoners who have been cleared for release. Although some stories are still unknown, the stories of nearly 700 prisoners are referenced either by links to Andy's extensive archive of articles about Guantánamo, or to the chapters in "The Guantánamo Files"
where they can be found.

Andy Worthington underscores:

"It is my hope that this project will provide an invaluable research tool for those seeking to understand how it came to pass that the government of the United States turned its back on domestic and international law, establishing torture as official US policy, and holding men without charge or trial neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects to be put forward for trial in a federal court, but as 'illegal enemy combatants.'

"I also hope that it provides a compelling explanation of how that same government, under the leadership of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, established a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held -- at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total -- were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism."

Links to the list are included below:

Part 1 (ISNs 002 to 200):
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-the-definitive-prisoner-list-part-1/

Part 2 (ISNs 201 to 496):
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-the-definitive-prisoner-list-part-2/

Part 3 (ISNs 497 to 732):
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-the-definitive-prisoner-list-part-3/

Part 4 (ISNs 743 to 10030):
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/guantanamo-the-definitive-prisoner-list-part-4/

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BY SIOBHAN GORMAN and EVAN PEREZ

MARCH 3, 2009

WASHINGTON -- The Central Intelligence Agency destroyed 92 videotapes from the agency's detainee interrogation program, a far larger number than previously believed, the Justice Department said in a court filing Monday.

The disclosures in a New York federal court case marked the first major step by President Barack Obama's administration to reveal details of the controversial detention program approved by the Bush White House after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Obama administration is still uncertain about how to pursue allegations of wrongdoing against officials in the Bush administration. CIA Director Leon Panetta said last week he opposed prosecuting CIA officers who followed legal advice in putting suspects through such tactics as waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that the Obama administration labeled torture.

At the same time, Mr. Obama is making significant breaks with the past, including the move Monday to disclose long-secret information. The government made the disclosures in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking details of the CIA program.

"We want to give the people that work in the CIA the tools they need to keep us safe, but do so in a way that also protects our values," said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.

The Justice Department on Monday released memorandums that had laid the groundwork for the Bush administration's broad assertion of presidential power, overriding congressional oversight, international treaties and constitutional freedoms.

In one memo, Department of Justice lawyers said the president could order the U.S. military to mobilize domestically to combat terrorism, in contravention of laws that generally prohibit such use of the military on U.S. soil. Other memos described the president's power to conduct surveillance without court warrants.

Many of the legal opinions were written by John C. Yoo, a former official in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The Obama administration is defending Mr. Yoo and other former Bush officials who are being sued over their national-security legal work. In an October 2001 memo, Mr. Yoo asserted that "the president has both the constitutional and statutory authority to use the armed forces in military operations, against terrorists within the United States." He added that such a move wouldn't be subject to Fourth Amendment restrictions on unreasonable searches and seizures so long as they are acting in a military, not law-enforcement, function.

The government also released memos from the final months of the Bush administration that renounced the legal reasoning of the early post-9/11 period. In one October 2008 memo, a top Justice official called earlier opinions "either incorrect or highly questionable."

Continue reading here.

Propelling prisoners' heads into concrete walls by means of towels wrapped around their necks, savage beatings with fists and rifles that left prisoners crippled, hanging prisoners by the arms with their arms strung up behind them, depriving prisoners of sleep for weeks on end, which has been thought the worst torture possible for 500 years, causing prisoners to freeze -- sometimes to death, and waterboarding are but a partial list of the torture methods ordered by America's highest officials. In the "Preliminary Memorandum of the Justice Robert H. Jackson Conference on Federal Prosecutions of War Criminals," law school Dean Lawrence Velvel, the founder of the Jackson Conference, details the full spectrum of tortures performed in wholesale combinations -- not one torture by itself -- on detainees around the world. His Preliminary Memorandum is a precursor to a formal legal complaint to be filed with the Justice Department this spring.

The Preliminary Memorandum identifies 31 culprits and details the war crimes they committed, the laws they broke, and the many fulsome warnings they received regarding their actions from numerous governmental lawyers and officials high and low, including the Judge Advocate Generals of all the armed services. The culprits who should be prosecuted include Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Addington, Tenet, Bybee, Yoo, Haynes, Chertoff and others. Furthermore, the Preliminary Memorandum calls the Bush administration's illegal acts "an attempted constitutional revolution that succeeded for years." It began six days after 9/11, when Bush secretly gave the CIA permission to "murder . . . people all over the world." It continued in a series of secret, wholly specious legal memos authorizing torture, electronic eavesdropping, wholesale violations of law, and Presidential usurpation of the role of Congress.

Public pressure eventually forced the administration to declassify a few of the memos. These purported to authorize war crimes outlawed by the Geneva Conventions and U.S. anti-torture laws. Among them was John Yoo's infamous "torture memo" defining torture as "requiring the pain associated with organ failure or death," saying torture supposedly couldn't exist if the torturer wanted information, and urging that the President could do anything he wanted, including paying no attention whatever to Congressional laws. Meanwhile, Bush administration officials and lawyers ignored extensive warnings given them by government officials that they were engaging in criminal acts; the warnings were given both orally and in extensive memos.

Obama Must Not Ignore Abuses of Bush Era: Another Test Comes Tomorrow with the Case Against Jeppesen Dataplan

President Obama has failed an early test of his commitment to break with Bush administration policies by blocking the public disclosure of descriptions of torture and abuse suffered by a terror suspect. It's hard to tell if this is a wrongheaded effort to protect the Bush administration from embarrassment or if the Obama team is still just getting its footing. Let's hope it's the latter.

Binyam Mohamed was captured by U.S. and British intelligence officials in Pakistan in 2002, rendered to Morocco and is now a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. All the charges against Mohamed have been dropped. He says that confessions were tortured out of him. But a statement provided by the United States to British intelligence about Mohamed's mistreatment won't be made part of an opinion by the British High Court because the Bush administration threatened to end intelligence-sharing if it was included. And the Obama administration is going along with that position.

How is it that Obama, who made a dramatic public showing of reversing the Bush administration's terror suspect treatment policies in his first days in office, would continue to use faux claims of national security to keep the public in the dark about the abuses inflicted on prisoners?

According to the British court, the disclosure would have involved "seven very short paragraphs amounting to about 25 lines," summarizing reports on Mohamed's treatment by the United States. The passages, the court said, would have given credence to Mohamed's allegations. There was no danger of compromising intelligence information, the court noted, as all names had been redacted from the documents.

This is not the way to fulfill a campaign promise to return us to the rule of law. What we did to Mohamed needs to be publicly acknowledged. Moving on does not mean covering up.

Another test comes on Monday, when oral arguments are scheduled in a case involving President Bush's rendition policy. The five men who brought suit, including Mohamed, were seized and removed to countries known to torture prisoners or to overseas secret CIA-run prisons -- a policy that CIA Director nominee Leon Panetta vowed to end in his confirmation testimony on Thursday. His claim the next day that he didn't know if rendition for the purpose of abusive interrogation was Bush administration policy is hardly credible and once again suggests Obama administration waffling.

The litigants suffered medieval tortures, including one who was deliberately cut all over and then had stinging liquid poured into his wounds. They are suing a subsidiary of Boeing Co., Jeppesen Dataplan, that allegedly arranged the flights.

The Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals is being asked to rule on the "state secrets privilege," a tactic that the Bush administration widely employed to avoid answering serious allegations of lawless conduct.

The Bush administration would simply claim that the suit jeopardizes "state secrets" and, like magic, the case would go away. The case Monday is an appeal of a federal district court's decision to dismiss the torture victims' suit on state secrets grounds.

We'll have to see whether the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder continues to use this legal maneuver to avoid judicial review of the outrages against humanity committed during the Bush era. So far, the department has not given any indication it will alter its posture in the case.

When our government devastates the lives of human beings and acts in direct contravention of our laws and Constitution, it should not be allowed to hide from justice behind a shield of national secrets.

Federal judges are perfectly capable of reviewing classified evidence, and there are long-standing procedures to guard the nation's secrets in lawsuits. To suggest otherwise means that the executive branch can act with impunity whenever foreign intelligence matters are at issue.

In the Senate, the State Secrets Protection Act would end the blanket immunity the executive branch now claims under the state secrets privilege, and it would be comforting if Obama would throw his support behind it.

Obama is saying all the right things to put America back on the path of right. Now he has to follow up the talk with the walk.