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POPSA Health Benefits Law Formed The Basis For The 'Torture Memo'
Jack Goldsmith, who succeeded Bybee at OLC, said that Yoo, a former OLC attorney who now teaches at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., arrived at that definition by relying on statute written in 2000 related to health benefits. "That statute defined an ‘emergency medical condition’ that warranted certain health benefits as a condition ‘manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including severe pain)’ such that the absence of immediate medical care might reasonably be thought to result in death, organ failure, or impairment of bodily function," Goldsmith wrote in his book, The Terror Presidency. "The health benefits statute's use of ‘severe pain’ had no relationship whatsoever to the torture statute. And even if it did, the health benefit statute did not define ‘severe pain.’ Rather it used the term ‘severe pain’ as a sign of an emergency medical condition that, if not treated, might cause organ failure and the like.... OLC’s clumsily definitional arbitrage
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POPSRonald Reagan On Prosecuting Torture My italics. Reagan was admant about prosecuting torture, but also prosecuting inhuman treatment that some might claim was not full-on torture. Now go read National Review or The Weekly Standard. And look what has happened to conservatism in America.
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POPSOlbermann Offers Hannity $1000/Second To Be Waterboarded Sean "waterboarding isn't torture" Hannity can now prove his claims. He can prove it to all of us. He's been saying loud and clear that waterboarding is not torture. I can hear a little fear in his voice on this clip when he's asked if he'll do it.
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POPSPentagon To Release Photos Of Detainee Abuse Next Month This shows that the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was not aberrational but was systemic and widespread," said Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney involved with the 2004 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that led to the promise to release the photographs. "This will underscore calls for accountability for that abuse."
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POPSObama Open To Prosecuting Bush Administration Officials:Torture Interrogations The president had said earlier that he didn't want to see prosecutions of the CIA agents and interrogators who took part in waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, so long as they acted within parameters spelled out by government superiors who held that such practices were legal at the time. But the administration's stance on Bush administration lawyers who actually wrote the memos approving these tactics has been less clear and Obama declined to make it so. "There are a host of very complicated issues involved," Obama said.
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POPSWaterboarded 183 Times In One Month: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you'd need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you've waterboarded 90 times--still just half of what they did to KSM. The CIA wants you to believe waterboarding is effective. Yet somehow, it took them 183 applications of the waterboard in a one month period to get what they claimed was cooperation out of KSM. That doesn't sound very effective to me.
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POPSRush Limbaugh Lies: McCain Says He Provided Intell While Being Torture (Not True) Elsewhere in his memoir, McCain recalled providing false information to his captors on multiple occasions in order to “suspend the abuse.” Further, McCain explained in a 2005 Newsweek column that he believed torture would yield little actionable intelligence. “In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — whether it is true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering,” McCain wrote. McCain was right. As the Washington Post reported last month, the torture of Abu Zubaida — who was once thought to be a high-level AQI operative — did not foil “a single significant plot” and provided the CIA with a number of “false leads.” “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms,” one former intelligence official told the Post. Further, “most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was
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POPSJoe Scarborough Mocks Torture He is so condescending in manner yet truly knows nothing. He just doesn't have a clear view of what's going on. With all the researchers he has at hand, he comes up with this dribble? He and Glenn Beck need to have a good cry together.
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POPSRush Limbaugh's 10 Most Intelligent Remarks/s 7. “We are a growing country and everybody needs energy! We're not going to stay the United States if we start reducing energy usage. Conservation is not the answer.” 8. To a black caller: “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.” 9. On torture at Abu Ghraib: “This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation. And we're going to ruin people's lives over it, and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people—you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some team off?” 10. “Screw the world. Do you really think we ought to govern ourselves based on what the world thinks of us?”
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POPSGOP Lawmakers Won't Back Sen Leahy's Calls To Investigate Bush Admin Crimes Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and former prosecutor, told students at Georgetown Law School that although President Barack Obama was unsupportive of the idea of “looking backwards” “many Americans feel we need to get to the bottom of what went wrong.” “We need to be able to read the page before we turn it,” he said. “I continue to talk about this prospect with others in Congress, and with outside groups and experts,” Leahy said. “I continue to call on Republicans to recognize that this is not about partisan politics. It is about being honest with ourselves as a country. We need to move forward together. But we cannot ignore the failures of government forever. We do so at our peril.”
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POPSThe Torture Apologists Are Losing Now check out THIS part: Vice President Dick Cheney micromanaged his interrogation from the White House basement. "The high-level discussions about these 'enhanced interrogation techniques' were so detailed," ABC's sources said, "some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic." Bush has acknowledged he was aware of those meetings at the time. Much more at the source: http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/torture-apologists-have-no-place-left
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POPSSpain Considering Torture Related Charges Aganist Bush Administration Officials Con't: The move represents a step toward ascertaining the legal accountability of top Bush administration officials for allegations of torture and mistreatment of prisoners in the campaign against terrorism. But some American experts said that even if warrants were issued their significance could be more symbolic than practical, and that it was a near certainty that the warrants would not lead to arrests if the officials did not leave the United States. The complaint under review also names John C. Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who wrote secret legal opinions saying the president had the authority to circumvent the Geneva Conventions, and Douglas J. Feith, the former under secretary of defense for policy. The court case was not entirely unexpected, as several human rights groups have been asking judges in different countries to indict Bush administration officials. One group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, had asked a German prosecutor for such an indict
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POPSRed Cross Report Confirms Torture At CIA Black Sites FTA: I quote from this report in which Mr. Kiriakou essentially says every time we had to use a new procedure, if we had to him him, slap him, whatever you would have to cable headquarters and get approval from the Deputy Director of Operations which is a very high position in the CIA. Meanwhile the Director of Central Intelligence at the time, this was the spring and summer of 2002 in the case of Abu Zubaydah, was George Tenet who was traveling across the river every day to principles meetings at the White House. The principles committee includes the National Security Adviser, then Condoleeza Rice, the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of State Colin Powell, the then Attorney General John Ashcroft, the highest law enforcement official in the United States of course. All of whom were briefed on this day by day. Not least because George Tenet apparently was worried that he would get stuck with this.
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