Torture, Who Me? (Part VII)

Phew! That's the last time I'm uploading such heavy files! I know, I know, I should have reduced them in size but thought, for those who actually wanted to read them, that might make the images a bit fuzzy... In any case, there you have it: what the Bush administration thought about international law.

Incidentally, the psychological profile of Abu Zubaydah detailed in this memo is also worth a look. I kept thinking, hey, that could have been my psychological profile or the profile of a bunch of people I know. Obviously, they would know what to do with people like that, wouldn't they?

Here's my other two-bits: if the clamour builds over these memos, I think the most that will happen (if we're lucky) is that Mr. Jay S. Bybee will be forced to say byebye to the US judiciary. But if someone can actually write this stuff as a legal opinion, he certainly has the thick skin to withstand all sorts of shaming.

And we know all about thick skinned advisers to the government, don't we!

Torture, Who Me? (Part VI)

Torture, Who Me? (Part V)

Have been reduced to uploading image by image... Know not why...

Torture, Who Me? (Part IV)

By the way, if you want to look at the other memos released or download them all in PDF format, you can go to the ACLU's own website....

Torture, Who Me? (Part III)

So, the reactions are already coming in... Of course, Bush and his gang of war criminals are mighty upset at this disclosure. Here's an extract from AFP:

"WASHINGTON (AFP) – Amid calls for torture prosecutions, former Bush administration officials Friday slammed President Barack Obama's release of terror interrogation memos, warning the move would fuel "timidity and fear" among US spies.

...
[I]n an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, former CIA director Michael Hayden and former attorney general Michael Mukasey charged that disclosure of the memos "was unnecessary as a legal matter, and is unsound as a matter of policy."

"Its effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past, and that we came sorely to regret on September 11, 2001."

It should of course be pointed out that Obama has pledged NOT to prosecute any CIA operative who flouted such pussilanimous "institutional timidity" - which of course means no prosecutions of anyone above them either! - a position the ACLU has already denounced as "untenable."

Torture, Who Me? (Part II)

Ok, so there are a total of 18 pages in the memo. Blogger is only letting me upload a few pages at a time. So here are the next 3 pages of that memo.

Meanwhile, why am I not holding my breath regarding the prosecution of Bybee, Ashcroft, Bush et al? Here's Fox News reporting that former AG David Rivkin, constitutional lawyer and member of the Council of Foreign Relations, thinks the memos prove the US did NOT torture....

Torture, Who Me? (Part I)

Ok, it's taken me a bit of work to get these images up here, but I thought this deserved at least this much. This is the full text of one of the four previously classified Bush government internal memos released by the Obama administration today in response to a court order. Collectively these memos are known as the "torture memos" in which the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel provided legal justification for the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the CIA. The memos are only lightly censored.

The one on display here (for some reason I think I will have to break up the upload into groups of 5 pages) is the earliest of these, an August 1, 2002 memo signed by then Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, offering supposedly "legal advice" to the CIA about how to go about torturing Al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah (who as you may remember was arrested from Faisalabad after a shootout) so that the always upright agency would not fall foul of US laws. Jay S. Bybee, the legal eagle here by the way, now serves as federal appeals court judge (!).

This memo had, in fact, been partly leaked about five years ago causing an outcry but the entire text of the memo had never been made public until now.

I don't know if any of you has the patience to go through the entire memo, but I did. And what struck me was the bone-chillingly clinical nature in which this man, a US government official, and a lawyer, discusses elements of torture. I don't know about you but I really don't see the difference between this and the documentation of the horrific Nazi experiments on human beings, to which as we know, Americans never stop expressing shock and incredulity.

Would Jay S. Bybee and his superiors such as Attorney General John Ashcroft and President George W. Bush - who himself authorized torture of detainees - be now hauled before a Nuremburg-style trial court for documented war crimes?

I wouldn't hold my breath.