Newly released documents show House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was briefed on the Bush administration’s torture of foreign prisoners in September 2002. The disclosure apparently contradicts Pelosi’s claim she was never given details on what techniques were used. Intelligence records show Pelosi and then-House Intelligence Committee chair Porter Goss were briefed on the interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded eighty-three times. Pelosi says she was never told the waterboarding was used.
The White House is joining Senate Democratic leaders in rejecting calls for a special commission to investigate the Bush administration’s torture of foreign prisoners. At a meeting with top Democrats, President Obama said he opposes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s call for establishing a torture panel. On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid endorsed Obama’s view, saying a commission would distract from top legislative priorities. Some progressive critics have argued a panel wouldn’t go far enough in seeking justice and have called for immediate indictments of the Bush officials who approved torture.
On Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi backed an investigation and said witnesses shouldn’t receive immunity for testifying. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is reporting President Obama personally nixed a proposal to create a 9/11 Commission-style panel as an alternative to releasing the memos. Obama made the decision following weeks of administration debate. A White House official summarized Obama’s reponse as: “I banned all this. This chapter is over. What we don’t need now is to become a sort of feeding frenzy where we go back and re-litigate all this.”
More details have been revealed on high-level Bush administration involvement in authorizing torture. According to a timeline in the newly declassified Senate Intelligence Committee report, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top White House officials approved torture methods, including waterboarding, as early as 2002. Attorney General Eric Holder has described waterboarding as illegal, while President Obama now says he won’t rule out prosecuting top Bush officials who approved illegal acts. Rice’s backing came in July 2002, when she gave a green light for the interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. One year later, the list of officials voicing approval grew to Vice President Dick Cheney, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and National Security Council legal adviser John Bellinger.
From the ACLU’s website…
On April 16, 2009, the Department of Justice released four secret memos used by the Bush administration to justify torture. Read the release >>
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A 18-page memo, dated August 1, 2002, from Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF] |
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A 46-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF] |
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A 20-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF] |
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A 40-page memo, dated May 30, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF] |
Demand Accountability for Torture! >>
Now I am wondering can we get our US courts to do the same! I hope so.
A Spanish court has launched a criminal investigation into whether six Bush administration lawyers including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales violated international law by providing the legal framework to justify the Bush administration’s use of torture at Guantanamo. Spain’s law allows it to claim jurisdiction in the case because five Spanish citizens or residents who were prisoners at Guantanamo Bay say they were tortured there. The case was sent to the Spanish prosecutor’s office for review by Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who ordered the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998. The other former Bush administration officials facing investigation are former Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay Bybee; Pentagon official Douglas Feith; Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington and and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes. Michael Ratnerof the Center for Constitutional Rights praised the Spanish court’s decision and said arrest warrants might have already been issued.
Michael Ratner, author of The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: “If you are any of those six at this point, you don’t want to go to 25 countries that make up the European Union because you may be subject to immediate arrest. What will happen next is this investigation will most likely continue in a very vigorous form. It will look at those six, and it will also have the possibility of going up the chain of command, not just to Rumsfeld, but all the way up to Cheney and Bush. So it’s a serious investigation, it’s one the Obama administration has to take seriously. So it means for them that the pressure is increasing in this country for them to open its own criminal investigation.”
The insurance giant AIG is facing new Congressional and legal scrutiny over how it funneled tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money to banks facing huge losses that AIG had insured. In what some have called the “backdoor bailout”, AIG gave nearly $13 billion to Goldman Sachs and tens of billions more to other firms including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and several foreign banks. On Thursday, twenty-six House Democrats signed a letter by Congressmember Elijah Cummings asking the bailout program’s inspector general to investigate the payments. Meanwhile New York State attorney general Andrew Cuomo subpoenaed AIG for information related to the derivatives payments funneled to the banks.
The bailed-out financial giant Citigroup meanwhile is coming under scrutiny for a ten million dollar plan to build new offices for top executives. Citigroup has received $45 billion dollars under the taxpayer-funded bailout.
