CIA Emails Reveal Winners and Losers

CIA Emails Reveal Winners and Losers of National Security Access
Full Article:
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/08/cia-emails-reveal-winners-and-losers-national-security-access/56297/

Excerpt:

For everyone who didn't get special access to information about the Osama bin Laden raid, today was a little bit discouraging as new e-mails revealed CIA officials gushing over Hollywood filmakers at the expense of trained reporters and documentarians.

The filmmakers given top notch access have been known for months: Director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal, the team behind the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker and the upcoming film on the mission to kill bin Laden Zero Dark Thirty. But we never got to see who was vying with them for access to details on the bin Laden raid, a group that includes former New York Times reporter Howard Blum, the History Channel and The BBC. Typically, details about deliberations over who wins and who loses in the competitive game of CIA access remains a secret, but thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch, those conversations became public today.

From the outset, CIA, White House, and Pentagon officials began discussing the various Osama bin Laden projects with a slight degree of favoritism toward Bigelow and Boal's film. But pretty quickly the Oscar-winning pair blew away the competition and a highly-cordial subject-filmmaker relationship ensued.

Naomi Wolf Notes:

The Mark Boal/Kathryn Bigelow post is a propos. Am I the only one who is noticing that, if the Senate investigation finds that Boal and Bigelow were given classified info -- and I can tell you from my own interviews with the detainees' lawyers, the torture methods of detainees are CLASSIFIED -- then they are potentially guilty of exactly what Assange and Manning are accused of? In other words, if Assange is unable to leave the Ecuadorean embassy -- because he disclosed classified information -- and Manning is in solitary, stripped naked and denied his glasses -- because he released classified information -- then why are Bigelow and Boal -- if they disclosed classified information -- not facing the same threats of prosecution? Conversely, if we are being consistent (and of course best to NOT prosecute people for this 'crime', which was not prosecuted for decades before Obama went crazy with prosecutions) we keep Bigelow and Boal -- and Assange and Manning -- out of jail/away from threats of prosecution.

If classified info turns out to have been involved, then there is no real legal difference between Zero Dark Thirty and Wikileaks -- especially if the filmmakers keep insisting on 'authenticity' and 'true events'.

Unless the only difference between who is in prison in solitary, and who gets to go in nice clothes to film screenings, is whether the classified info exposes the US government to criticism, or else flatters its narrative.

Brennan chosen by Barack Obama as CIA head

John Brennan chosen by Barack Obama as new CIA head
The mastermind of Barack Obama's secret drone war was chosen on Monday to lead the CIA and "relentlessly" extend its controversial campaign against al-Qaeda into the president's second term.
Jon Swaine, Washington
07 Jan 2013
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/9786434/John-Brennan-chosen-by-Barack-Obama-as-new-CIA-head.html

John Brennan, Mr Obama's counter-terrorism adviser, was nominated as the intelligence agency's next director two months after David Petraeus resigned over an extramarital affair with his biographer.

He has played a key role in expanding a programme of air strikes by unmanned drones on suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, which has killed more than 2,000 people.

Accepting the nomination in a speech at the White House, Mr Brennan, 57, said: "I will make it my mission to ensure the CIA has the tools it needs to keep our country safe."

He paid tribute to CIA successes that would never be known outside the "hallowed halls of Langley and the White House". Many human rights campaigners say that the drone campaign is illegal.

Mr Obama said Mr Brennan would "remain relentless" in pursuing al-Qaeda.

Praising him as a tireless public servant who obsesses about US security, he added: "I'm not sure he has slept in four years".

White House colleagues have described him as "a priest whose blessing has become indispensable" to the president in their selection of targets for drone strikes from a so-called "kill list".

A career spy who served as CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, Mr Brennan was also accused of being complicit in the agency's torture of terror suspects under former president George W. Bush.

Controversy over his involvement in the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" is believed to have prevented Mr Obama from nominating Mr Brennan to lead the CIA after his 2008 election win.

He promised to ensure the work of the CIA "always reflects the liberties, the freedoms, and the values that we all hold dear".

Mr Obama also confirmed his nomination of Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator whose foreign policy stances have attracted criticism from former colleagues, as his next defence secretary.

If confirmed by the Senate, the 66-year-old would be the first combat veteran of the Vietnam War, and the first veteran of enlisted rank, to head the defence department.

Hailing him as an "American patriot" who "bears the scars and the shrapnel of battles fought in our name", Mr Obama said: "Chuck knows that war is not an abstraction".

The selection of Mr Hagel, who once criticised intimidation of US politicians by "the Jewish lobby" has been sharply criticised as an insult to Israel that could jeopardise a key alliance.

Mr Obama on Monday praised Mr Hagel's "willingness to speak his mind", stating that he "understands that America stands strongest when we stand with allies and with friends".

Lindsey Graham, a Republican Senator for South Carolina, has said Mr Hagel "would be the most antagonistic secretary of defence towards the state of Israel in our nation's history".

Mr Hagel has also been criticised for opposing additional unilateral sanctions on Iran and for urging Israel's government to engage in direct talks with Hamas, the militant Islamic group.

He pledged yesterday to give Mr Obama his "honest and most informed counsel".

Both nominees must be confirmed in votes by the US Senate, where Mr Obama's Democrats hold a majority. So far Ted Cruz, a Texas senator, has promised to vote against Mr Hagel's appointment.

Coming soon after the selection of Senator John Kerry to replace Hillary Clinton as US Secretary of State, the nominations also prompted accusations that Mr Obama had failed to make his Cabinet diverse.

Tim Miller, a Republican spokesman, said Mr Obama's promotion of "three old white guys" who backed the war in Iraq made a mockery of his re-election campaign slogan, which he restyled as "Forward-ish".

Mr Brennan was also blamed for a series of erroneous briefings to the media following the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, which angered the then-defence secretary Robert Gates.

After Mr Brennan said bin Laden had been killed while using one of his wives as a shield, officials later said that this was untrue.

A letter to Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty

A letter to Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty's apology for torture
By peddling the lie that CIA detentions led to Bin Laden's killing, you have become a Leni Riefenstahl-like propagandist of torture
Naomi Wolf
Friday 4 January 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/04/letter-kathryn-bigelow-zero-dark-thirty

The Hurt Locker was a beautiful, brave film; many young women in film were inspired as they watched you become the first woman ever to win an Oscar for directing. But with Zero Dark Thirty, you have attained a different kind of distinction.

Your film Zero Dark Thirty is a huge hit here. But in falsely justifying, in scene after scene, the torture of detainees in "the global war on terror", Zero Dark Thirty is a gorgeously-shot, two-hour ad for keeping intelligence agents who committed crimes against Guantánamo prisoners out of jail. It makes heroes and heroines out of people who committed violent crimes against other people based on their race – something that has historical precedent.

Your film claims, in many scenes, that CIA torture was redeemed by the "information" it "secured", information that, according to your script, led to Bin Laden's capture. This narrative is a form of manufacture of innocence to mask a great crime: what your script blithely calls "the detainee program".

What led to this amoral compromising of your film-making?

Could some of the seduction be financing? It is very hard to get a film without a pro-military message, such as The Hurt Locker, funded and financed. But according to sources in the film industry, the more pro-military your message is, the more kinds of help you currently can get: from personnel, to sets, to technology – a point I made in my argument about the recent militarized Katy Perry video.

It seems implausible that scenes such as those involving two top-secret, futuristic helicopters could be made without Pentagon help, for example. If the film received that kind of undisclosed, in-kind support from the defense department, then that would free up million of dollars for the gigantic ad campaign that a film like this needs to compete to win audience.

This also sets a dangerous precedent: we can be sure, with the "propaganda amendment" of the 2013 NDAA, just signed into law by the president, that the future will hold much more overt corruption of Hollywood and the rest of US pop culture. This amendment legalizes something that has been illegal for decades: the direct funding of pro-government or pro-military messaging in media, without disclosure, aimed at American citizens.

Then, there is the James Frey factor. You claim that your film is "based on real events", and in interviews, you insist that it is a mixture of fact and fiction, "part documentary". "Real", "true", and even "documentary", are big and important words. By claiming such terms, you generate media and sales traction – on a mendacious basis. There are filmmakers who work very hard to produce films that are actually "based on real events": they are called documentarians. Alex Gibney, in Taxi to the Dark Side, and Rory Kennedy, in Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, have both produced true and sourceable documentary films about what your script blithely calls "the detainee program" – that is, the regime of torture to generate false confessions at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib – which your script claims led straight to Bin Laden.

Fine, fellow reporter: produce your sources. Provide your evidence that torture produced lifesaving – or any – worthwhile intelligence.

But you can't present evidence for this claim. Because it does not exist.

Five decades of research, cited in the 2008 documentary The End of America, confirm that torture does not work. Robert Fisk provides another summary of that categorical conclusion. And this 2011 account from Human Rights First rebuts the very premise of Zero Dark Thirty.

Your actors complain about detainees' representation by lawyers – suggesting that these do-gooders in suits endanger the rest of us. I have been to see your "detainee program" firsthand. The prisoners, whom your film describes as being "lawyered up", meet with those lawyers in rooms that are wired for sound; yet, those lawyers can't tell the world what happened to their clients – because the descriptions of the very torture these men endured are classified.

I have seen the room where the military tribunal takes the "testimony" from people swept up in a program that gave $5,000 bounties to desperately poor Afghanis to incentivize their turning-in innocent neighbors. The chairs have shackles to the floor, and are placed in twos, so that one prisoner can be threatened to make him falsely condemn the second.

I have seen the expensive video system in the courtroom where – though Guantánamo spokesmen have told the world's press since its opening that witnesses' accounts are brought in "whenever reasonable" – the monitor on the system has never been turned on once: a monitor that could actually let someone in Pakistan testify to say, "hey, that is the wrong guy". (By the way, you left out the scene where the CIA dude sodomizes the wrong guy: Khaled el-Masri, "the German citizen unfortunate enough to have a similar name to a militant named Khaled al-Masri.")

In a time of darkness in America, you are being feted by Hollywood, and hailed by major media. But to me, the path your career has now taken reminds of no one so much as that other female film pioneer who became, eventually, an apologist for evil: Leni Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl's 1935 Triumph of the Will, which glorified Nazi military power, was a massive hit in Germany. Riefenstahl was the first female film director to be hailed worldwide.

It may seem extreme to make comparison with this other great, but profoundly compromised film-maker, but there are real echoes. When Riefenstahl began to glamorize the National Socialists, in the early 1930s, the Nazis' worst atrocities had not yet begun; yet abusive detention camps had already been opened to house political dissidents beyond the rule of law – the equivalent of today's Guantánamo, Bagram base, and other unnameable CIA "black sites". And Riefenstahl was lionised by the German elites and acclaimed for her propaganda on behalf of Hitler's regime.

But the world changed. The ugliness of what she did could not, over time, be hidden. Americans, too, will wake up and see through Zero Dark Thirty's apologia for the regime's standard lies that this brutality is somehow necessary. When that happens, the same community that now applauds you will recoil.

Like Riefenstahl, you are a great artist. But now you will be remembered forever as torture's handmaiden.

ZERO CONSCIENCE IN “ZERO DARK THIRTY”

Jane Mayer
December 14, 2012
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/12/torture-in-kathryn-bigelows-zero-dark-thirty.html

At the same time that the European Court of Human Rights has issued a historic ruling condemning the C.I.A.’s treatment of a terror suspect during the Bush years as “torture,” a Hollywood movie about the agency’s hunt for Osama bin Laden, “Zero Dark Thirty”—whose creators say that they didn’t want to “judge” the interrogation program—appears headed for Oscar nominations. Can torture really be turned into morally neutral entertainment?

“Zero Dark Thirty,” which opens across the country next month, is a pulse-quickening film that spends its first half hour or so depicting a fictionalized version of the Bush Administration’s secret U.S. interrogation program. In reality, the C.I.A.’s program of calibrated cruelty was deemed so illegal, and so immoral, that the director of the F.B.I. withdrew his personnel rather than have them collaborate with it, and the top lawyer at the Pentagon laid his career on the line in an effort to stop a version of the program from spreading to the armed forces. The C.I.A.’s actions convulsed the national-security community, leading to a crisis of conscience inside the top ranks of the U.S. government. The debate echoed the moral seriousness of the political dilemma once posed by slavery, a subject that is brilliantly evoked in Steven Spielberg’s new film, “Lincoln”; by contrast, the director of “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow, milks the U.S. torture program for drama while sidestepping the political and ethical debate that it provoked. In her hands, the hunt for bin Laden is essentially a police procedural, devoid of moral context. If she were making a film about slavery in antebellum America, it seems, the story would focus on whether the cotton crops were successful.

After some critics called Bigelow a torture apologist, she defended the fairness and historical accuracy of her movie. “The film doesn’t have an agenda, and it doesn’t judge. I wanted a boots-on-the-ground experience,” she told my New Yorker colleague Dexter Filkins, who interviewed her for a Talk of the Town piece. At a Los Angeles press junket, the film’s screenwriter, Mark Boal, complained that critics were “mischaracterizing” the torture sequences: “I understand that those scenes are graphic and unsparing and unsentimental. But I think that what the film does over the course of two hours is show the complexity of the debate.” His point was that because the film shows multiple approaches to intelligence gathering, of which torture is only one tactic, and because the torture isn’t shown as always producing correct or instant leads, it offers a nuanced answer to the question of whether torture works.

But whether torture “worked” was far from the most important question about its use. I’ve seen the film and, as much as I admired Bigelow’s Oscar-winning picture “The Hurt Locker,” I think that this time, by ignoring the full weight of the dark history of torture, her work falls disturbingly short. To begin with, despite Boal’s contentions, “Zero Dark Thirty” does not capture the complexity of the debate about America’s brutal detention program. It doesn’t include a single scene in which torture is questioned, even though the Bush years were racked by internal strife over just that issue—again, not just among human-rights and civil-liberties lawyers, but inside the F.B.I., the military, the Justice Department, and the C.I.A. itself, which eventually abandoned waterboarding because it feared, correctly, that the act constituted a war crime. None of this ethical drama seems to interest Bigelow.

To establish a baseline of moral awareness, she shows her heroine—a C.I.A. counterterrorism officer called Maya, played by Jessica Chastain—delicately wincing as she hands the more muscled interrogators a pitcher of water with which to waterboard a detainee. Maya is also shown standing mutely by when the detainee is strung up by ropes, stripped naked, and forced to crawl in a dog collar. In reality, when the C.I.A. first subjected a detainee to incarceration in a coffin-size “confinement box,” as is shown in the movie, an F.B.I. agent present at the scene threw a fit, warned the C.I.A. contractor proposing the plan that it was illegal, counterproductive, and reprehensible. The fight went all the way to the top of the Bush Administration. Bigelow airbrushes out this showdown, as she does virtually the entire debate during the Bush years about the treatment of detainees.

The lone anti-torture voice shown in the film is a split-second news clip of President Barack Obama, taken from a “60 Minutes” interview, in which he condemns torture. It flashes on a television screen that’s in the background of a scene set in Pakistan; the movie’s terrorist-hunters, who are holding a meeting, barely look up, letting Obama’s pronouncement pass without comment. “By this point in the film,” as the CNN national-security analyst Peter Bergen wrote recently, “the audience has already seen that the C.I.A. has employed coercive interrogation techniques on an al Qaeda detainee that produced a key lead in the hunt for bin Laden. In the film, Obama’s opposition to torture comes off as wrongheaded and prissy.”

Bigelow has portrayed herself as a reluctant truth-teller. She recently described the film’s torture scenes as “difficult to shoot.” She said, “I wish it was not part of our history. But it was.”

Yet what is so unsettling about “Zero Dark Thirty” is not that it tells this difficult history but, rather, that it distorts it. In addition to excising the moral debate that raged over the interrogation program during the Bush years, the film also seems to accept almost without question that the C.I.A.’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” played a key role in enabling the agency to identify the courier who unwittingly led them to bin Laden. But this claim has been debunked, repeatedly, by reliable sources with access to the facts. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent first reported, shortly after bin Laden was killed, Leon Panetta, then the director of the C.I.A., sent a letter to Arizona Senator John McCain, clearly stating that “we first learned about ‘the facilitator / courier’s nom de guerre’ from a detainee not in the C.I.A.’s custody.” Panetta wrote that “no detainee in C.I.A. custody revealed the facilitator / courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts.”

The Senators Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have undermined the film’s version of events further still. “The original lead information had no connection to C.I.A. detainees,” they wrote in their own letter, revealed by the Post last year. Feinstein and Levin noted that a third detainee in C.I.A. custody did provide information on the courier, but, importantly, they stressed that “he did so the day before he was interrogated by the C.I.A. using their coercive interrogation techniques.” In other words, contrary to the plotline of “Zero Dark Thirty,” and contrary to self-serving accounts of C.I.A. officers implicated in the interrogation program, senators with access to the record say that torture did not produce the leads that led to finding and killing bin Laden.

Top senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee have amplified that position in additional interviews this week. Speaking with the Huffington Post, Feinstein said of the movie’s narrative, “Based on what I know, I don’t believe it is true.” Republicans, too, criticized the movie’s plot. “It’s wrong. It’s wrong. I know for a fact, not because of this report—my own knowledge—that waterboarding, torture, does not lead to reliable information … in any case—not this specific case—in any case,” said John McCain, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, who was himself tortured during the Vietnam War. The Huffington Post also quoted South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, another Republican member of the Armed Services Committee, saying, “I would argue that it’s not waterboarding that led to bin Laden’s demise. It was a lot of good intelligence-gathering from the Obama and Bush administrations, continuity of effort, holding people at Gitmo, putting the puzzle together over a long period of time—not torture.”

As Scott Shane wrote in the Times on Thursday, so little is publicly known about the C.I.A.’s erstwhile interrogation program that it is nearly impossible for outsiders to assess the facts with total confidence. But for the past three years, Democratic staffers at the Senate Intelligence Committee have been compiling six thousand pages of records related to the secret program, and in doing so they have found little to celebrate. It is hard to understand, then, why the creators of “Zero Dark Thirty” so confidently credit the program.

In addition to providing false advertising for waterboarding, “Zero Dark Thirty” endorses torture in several other subtle ways. At one point, the film’s chief C.I.A. interrogator claims, without being challenged, that “everyone breaks in the end,” adding, “it’s biology.” Maybe that’s what they think in Hollywood, but experts on the history of torture disagree. Indeed, many prisoners have been tortured to death without ever revealing secrets, while many others—including some of those who were brutalized during the Bush years—have fabricated disinformation while being tortured. Some of the disinformation provided under duress during those years, in fact, helped to lead the U.S. into the war in Iraq under false premises.

At another point in the film, an elderly detainee explains that he wants to coöperate with the U.S. because he “doesn’t want to be tortured again.” The clear implication is that brutalization brings breakthroughs. Other ways of getting intelligence, such as bribing sources with expensive race cars, are shown to work, too. But while those scenes last only a few minutes, the torture scenes seem to go on and on.

The filmmakers subtly put their thumb on the pro-torture scale, as Emily Bazelon put it, in another scene, too. A C.I.A. officer complains that there is no way for him to corroborate a lead on bin Laden’s whereabouts now that the detainees in Guantánamo all have lawyers. The suggestion is that if they are given due process rather than black eyes, there will be no way to get the necessary evidence. This is a canard, given that virtually all suspects in the American criminal-justice system have lawyers, yet their cases proceed smoothly and fairly every day.

Bigelow has stressed that she had “no agenda” when she made “Zero Dark Thirty.” Unsurprisingly, though, those who have defended the brutalization of detainees have already begun embracing the film as evidence that they are right. Joe Scarborough, the conservative host of MSNBC’s show “Morning Joe,” said recently that the film’s narrative, “whether you find it repugnant or not,” shows that the C.I.A. program was effective and “led to the couriers, that led, eventually, years later, to the killing of Osama bin Laden.” My guess is that this is just the beginning, and that by the time millions of Americans have seen this movie, they will believe that, as Frank Bruni put it in a recent Times column, “No waterboarding, no bin Laden.”

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect the entertainment industry to convey history accurately. Clearly, the creators of “Zero Dark Thirty” are storytellers who really know how to make a thriller. And it’s true that there are no rules when it comes to fiction. As Boal, the screenwriter, has protested in recent interviews, “It’s a movie, not a documentary.” But in the very first minutes of “Zero Dark Thirty,” before its narrative begins to unspool, the audience is told that the story it is about to see is “based on first-hand accounts of actual events.” If there is an expectation of accuracy, it is set up by the filmmakers themselves. It seems they want it both ways: they want the thrill that comes from revealing what happened behind the scenes as history was being made and the creative license of fiction, which frees them from the responsibility to stick to the truth.

Knowing the real facts—the ones that led the European Court of Human Rights to condemn America for torture this week—I had trouble enjoying the movie. I’ve interviewed Khaled El-Masri, the German citizen whose suit the E.C.H.R. adjudicated. He turned out to be a case of mistaken identity, an innocent car salesman whom the C.I.A. kidnapped and held in a black-site prison for four months, and who was “severely beaten, sodomized, shackled, and hooded.” What Masri lived through was so harrowing that, when I had a cup of coffee with him, a few years ago, he couldn’t describe it to me without crying. Maybe I care too much about all of this to enjoy it with popcorn. But maybe the creators of “Zero Dark Thirty” should care a little bit more.

Will "Zero Dark Thirty" Rehabilitate Torture?

Will the New Osama bin Laden Film "Zero Dark Thirty" Rehabilitate Torture?
Adam Serwer| Mon Dec. 10, 2012
http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2012/12/zero-dark-thirty-osama-bin-laden-torture

Director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal want their cinematic portrayal of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, to be seen as more than just a movie. "What we were attempting is almost a journalistic approach to film," Bigelow told The New Yorker's Dexter Filkins. The film is a "hybrid of the filmic and the journalistic," writer Mark Boal told New York. Speaking to Matt Lauer on NBC's Today, Bigelow said, "I think the film doesn't have an agenda. I think it just shows the story as, you know, the story of the greatest manhunt in history. And that's part of that history." But the film, according to those who have seen it, shows torture as central to the discovery of bin Laden's location, and this departs from what is publicly known about the raid on Abbottabad. So is Bigelow rehabilitating torture?

According to the New York Daily News, the film, which opens next month, "includes graphic torture scenes, including depictions of waterboarding and sexual humiliation, used to obtain information from detainees which ultimately help pinpoint bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan." Bigelow is no fan of torture, but she says she had to stick with the facts: "I wish that it wasn't a part of history, but it is and was." Not accurate history.

Filkins' fawning piece on Bigelow — he writes that "she feels a little like what she imagines the men and women who chased bin Laden must feel: elated" — points out that the Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) explained that the original information that led to bin Laden didn't come from a CIA detainee. Feinstein's letter was unequivocal: "The suggestion that the operation was carried out based on information gained through the harsh treatment of CIA detainees is not only inaccurate, it trivializes the work of individuals across multiple U.S. agencies that led to UBL and the eventual operation." Nor was Feinstein the only one to say so; a letter from the then-CIA director Leon Panetta sent to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) echoed the same findings.

Defenders of Bush-era enhanced interrogation waged a fierce public relations campaign to rehabilitate torture in the aftermath of the bin Laden killing, in part to award Bush credit for the raid. But the facts kept getting in the way. Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA official responsible for the destruction of videos recording the (ineffectual) torture of detainee Abu Zubayda, went on 60 Minutes and was unable to rebut the fact that alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed lied when questioned about bin Laden's courier, despite being tortured. The CIA inspector general found that "you could not in good conscience reach a definitive conclusion about whether any specific technique was especially effective, or [whether] the enhanced techniques in the aggregate really worked." Republicans are currently attempting to block a Senate intelligence committee investigation of the efficacy of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Someone attempting to make a "journalistic" feature film on the hunt for Osama bin Laden could be expected to be aware of all this. When Filkins asked Boal about the portrayal of torture departing from the known facts, he replied, "It's a movie, not a documentary." Bigelow and Boal want their film to be seen as a contribution to the historical record, not as mere entertainment. So far they are winning over influential film critics. If you're thinking of giving them an award, Zero Dark Thirty is "history"; if you're a journalist asking a question about a factual error in the film, it's just a movie.

The critical acclaim Zero Dark Thirty is already receiving suggests that it may do what Karl Rove could not have done with all the money in the world: embed in the popular imagination the efficacy, even the necessity, of torture, despite available evidence to the contrary. Whatever the artistic merits of the film, that will be its moral legacy. That's quite an accomplishment, but not a journalistic one.

The Times’ tortured relationship with the “T”-word

Dan Kennedy May 4, 2011
http://www.dankennedy.net/2011/05/04/the-times-tortured-relationship-with-the-t-word

The New York Times’ tortured relationship with the “T”-word takes an interesting turn today. The paper’s print and online editions diverge, and the Times manages to report on a debate over torture without quite acknowledging that the Bush administration, uh, tortured terrorism suspects.

First, the headline. On the front page of the print edition you’ll find this: “Harsh Methods of Questioning Debated Again.” Online, though, is the considerably more frank “Bin Laden Raid Revives Debate on Value of Torture.” Below the headline is a story summary that says, “The raid that led to Bin Laden’s death has raised anew the issue of using torture to gain intelligence.”

On the face of it, that seems like a straightforward acknowledgement that some suspects were tortured, which would be something of a landmark for the Times. Two years ago, then-public editor Clark Hoyt wrote that Times editors had decided not to describe waterboarding and other brutal interrogation tactics as “torture,” although it would quote critics as saying so. Indeed, Hoyt added, the Times had come under some criticism even for adopting the word “brutal” to describe those methods.

The Times in print

When you read today’s story, by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage, you learn that the “T”-word rule is still in effect. Here’s how it begins:

Did brutal interrogations produce the crucial intelligence that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden?

As intelligence officials disclosed the trail of evidence that led to the compound in Pakistan where Bin Laden was hiding, a chorus of Bush administration officials claimed vindication for their policy of “enhanced interrogation techniques” like waterboarding.

The “T”-word appears repeatedly in the story, but not as a description of what actually took place. Rather, it is in the context of “a national debate about torture,” Barack Obama’s past statements that waterboarding and other harsh methods were “torture,” efforts to avoid “a partisan battle over torture” and the like.

Among those quoted as claiming torture (OK, enhanced interrogation techniques) worked are Bush-era torture apologist John Yoo and U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., last seen subjecting Muslim-Americans to psychological torture at his Star Chamber hearings on Capitol Hill.

Now, let’s be clear. There is no evidence that waterboarding and other forms of torture had anything to do with producing the intelligence needed to track down Osama bin Laden. Indeed, it’s been reported that the worst of the Guantánamo terrorists, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, tried to divert interrogators away from bin Laden’s courier despite having been tortured repeatedly. In a withering takedown of the pro-torture argument, CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen writes at the Atlantic:

It is entirely possible that some valuable intelligence information about bin Laden’s couriers was gleaned from long-ago waterboarding. And it is possible that some of this information was part of what Attorney General Eric Holder Tuesday called a “mosaic” of information that led to bin Laden’s demise. But it is beyond doubt that the United States was able to track and then kill its arch enemy in Abbottabad based upon regular old gumshoe detective work, both traditional and innovative, that occurred years and years after the detainees in question were reportedly tortured. How exactly does that suffice to restore credibility to the pro-torture argument?

And just in case you’re not convinced that waterboarding is torture, consider the historical evidence, which I laid out in a piece for the Guardian last year. The Times frankly referred to waterboarding as torture in 1945 in reporting on its use against American prisoners of war who were held by the Japanese. No less an authority than U.S. Sen. John McCain has noted that some Japanese officers were executed for waterboarding prisoners. And Harvard’s Shorenstein Center last year produced a study showing that waterboarding was routinely described as torture until the Bush White House started using it against terrorism suspects.

The Times, as our leading news organization, has harmed the public discourse by refusing to call torture by its proper name. Today’s story is just another example of how it has tied itself into knots in its ongoing attempt to avoid saying the obvious.

Waterboarding 'Worked'?

Media push pro-torture message
Media Advisory
Fair.org
5/4/11
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4281

To hear some tell it, the intelligence clues that ultimately led to Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan were generated by the use of torture. But the evidence available so far does not bear this out.

Torture advocates on the right are claiming vindication. On Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor (5/2/11), Rep. Peter King (R.-N.Y.) announced that:

we obtained information several years ago, vital information about the courier for Obama [sic]. We obtained that information through waterboarding. And so for those who say that waterboarding doesn't work, to say that it should be stopped and never used again-- we got vital information which directly led to us bin Laden.


This led O'Reilly to proclaim: "You're not going to hear that on the other networks. I guarantee you."

Actually, talk about how water torture may have revealed the identity of bin Laden's trusted courier could be heard widely. On the CBS Evening News (5/2/11), reporter David Martin said, "Some of the leads to that courier came out of the CIA's secret prison where those Al-Qaeda captives were waterboarded."

And ABC World News reporter Jonathan Karl tapped Dick Cheney for expertise (5/2/11):

KARL: One key, Cheney suggests: the CIA's enhanced interrogation program that Obama stopped because he said it included torture. An early tip leading to bin Laden's courier came from some of those interrogations.

CHENEY: All I know is what I've seen in the newspaper at this point, but it wouldn't be surprising if, in fact, that program produced results that ultimately contributed to the success of this venture.


The Los Angeles Times (5/2/11) reported:

Crucial information about the trusted courier who owned the compound came years ago from CIA interrogations of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohamed, the official said. This is significant, because the Al-Qaeda mastermind was subject to waterboarding and other brutal interrogation methods.


Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank noted (5/3/11) that Obama killed bin Laden "with an apparent assist from the Bush administration's interrogation program." And on NBC's Today show (5/3/11), Jim Miklasziewski reported:

U.S. officials tell NBC News that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, while in CIA custody, provided key information regarding a courier close to bin Laden. Intelligence sometimes obtained through aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding.


But the details that are known so far do not support the argument that torture produced any of the key intelligence. As New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer wrote (NewYorker.com, 5/2/11):

You would think that if the CIA's interrogation of high-value detainees was all it took, the U.S. government would have succeeded in locating bin Laden before 2006, which is when the CIA's custody of so-called "high-value detainees" ended.... This timeline doesn’t seem to provide a lot of support for the pro-torture narrative.


The blog Think Progress (5/3/11) noted that administration officials disputed the idea that critical information came from torture sessions:

This morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe [5/3/11], Obama's counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan confirmed that the information acquired over nine years did not come from waterboarding but was pieced together from multiple sources.


The New York Times (5/4/11), interviewing an array of intelligence sources, reported that "a closer look at prisoner interrogations suggests that the harsh techniques played a small role at most in identifying Bin Laden's trusted courier and exposing his hide-out."

Most importantly, the Times noted that "two prisoners who underwent some of the harshest treatment--including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times--repeatedly misled their interrogators about the courier’s identity. "

An Associated Press dispatch (5/2/11) reported that:

Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.


This "up for debate" conclusion is strange, given that evidence would suggest that the pro-torture side of the "debate" has little to support their case. And such discussions serve to reaffirm a media narrative that tries to normalize torture by making it a debate that prioritizes outcomes--i.e, Does it work?--over legality and morality. (See Extra!, 1-2/02.)

Along those lines, CNN's Kiran Chetry (5/3/11) posed this question to former Bush national security adviser Condoleezza Rice:

Things like enhanced interrogation have fallen out of favor. This administration has said they were ending some of those controversial practices like waterboarding that were acceptable under the Bush administration. The other big thing is the so-called black sites, these CIA interrogation sites around the world. All of this met with huge criticism. As more trickles out about whether or not any of these strategies played a key role in eventually killing Osama bin Laden, do they have to rethink this administration?


Along with rethinking the Bush administration, there are many media voices suggesting we should be reevaluating the question of whether torture should be an accepted practice for the U.S. government. One can only hope the media treat the subject more carefully than they have in the past.

The illogic of the torture debate

Glenn Greenwald
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/05/04/torture/index.html

The killing of Osama bin Laden has, as The New York Times notes, reignited the debate over "brutal interrogations" -- by which it's meant that Republicans are now attempting to exploit the emotions generated by the killing to retroactively justify the torture regime they implemented. The factual assertions on which this attempt is based -- that waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation methods" produced evidence crucial to locating bin Laden -- are dubious in the extreme, for reasons Andrew Sullivan and Marcy Wheeler document. So fictitious are these claims that even Donald Rumsfeld has repudiated them.

But even if it were the case that valuable information were obtained during or after the use of torture, what would it prove? Nobody has ever argued that brutality will never produce truthful answers. It is sometimes the case that if you torture someone long and mercilessly enough, they will tell you something you want to know. Nobody has ever denied that. In terms of the tactical aspect of the torture debate, the point has always been -- as a consensus of interrogations professionals has repeatedly said -- that there are far more effective ways to extract the truth from someone than by torturing it out of them. The fact that one can point to an instance where torture produced the desired answer proves nothing about whether there were more effective ways of obtaining it.

This highlights what has long been a glaring fallacy in many debates over War on Terror policies: that Information X was obtained after using Policy A does not prove that Policy A was necessary or effective. That's just basic logic. This fallacy asserted itself constantly in the debate over warrantless surveillance. Proponents of the Bush NSA program would point to some piece of intelligence allegedly obtained during warrantless eavesdropping as proof that the illegal program was necessary and effective; obviously, though, that fact said nothing about whether the same information would also have been discovered through legal eavesdropping, i.e., eavesdropping approved in advance by the FISA court (and indeed, legal eavesdropping [like legal interrogation tactics] is typically more effective than the illegal version because, by necessity, it is far more focused on actual suspected Terrorism plots; warrantless eavesdropping entails the unconstrained power to listen in on any communications the Government wants without having to establish its connection to Terrorism). But in all cases, the fact that some piece of intelligence was obtained by some lawless Bush/Cheney War on Terror policy (whether it be torture or warrantless eavesdropping) proves nothing about whether that policy was effective or necessary.

And those causal issues are, of course, entirely independent of the legal and moral questions shunted to the side by this reignited "debate." There are many actions that the U.S. could take that would advance its interests that are nonetheless obviously wrong on moral and legal grounds. When Donald Trump recently suggested that we should simply take Libya's oil and that of any other country which we successfully invade and occupy, that suggestion prompted widespread mockery. That was the reaction despite the fact that stealing other countries' oil would in fact produce substantial benefits for the U.S. and advance our interests: it would help to lower gas prices, reduce our dependence on hostile oil-producing nations, and avoid having to degrade our own environment in order to drill domestically. Trump's proposal is morally reprehensible and flagrantly lawless despite how many benefits it would produce; therefore, no person of even minimal decency would embrace it no matter how many benefits it produces.

Exactly the same is true for the torture techniques used by the Bush administration and once again being heralded by its followers (and implicitly glorified by media stars who keep suggesting that they enabled bin Laden's detection). It makes no difference whether it extracted usable intelligence. Criminal, morally depraved acts don't become retroactively justified by pointing to the bounty they produced.
*
It was striking to note in yesterday's New York Times the obituary of Moshe Landau, the Israeli judge who presided over the 1961 war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann. It's a reminder that when even the most heinous Nazi war criminals were hunted down by the Israelis, they weren't shot in the head and then dumped into the ocean, but rather were apprehended, tried in a court of law, confronted with the evidence against them for all the world to see, and then punished in accordance with due process. The same was done to leading Nazis found by Allied powers and tried at Nuremberg. It's true that those trials took place after the war was over, but whether Al Qaeda should be treated as active warriors or mere criminals was once one of the few ostensible differences between the two parties on the question of Terrorism.

Speaking of which: I know that very few people have even a slight interest in the unexciting, party-pooping question of whether our glorious killing comported with legal principles, but for those who do, both The Guardian and Der Spiegel have good discussions of that issue.

Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs-military-leaks

Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture
• Massive leak reveals serial detainee abuse
• 15,000 unknown civilian deaths in war
Nick Davies, Jonathan Steele and David Leigh
guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 October 2010

A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.

Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.

The new logs detail how:

• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.

• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.

• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death.

As recently as December the Americans were passed a video apparently showing Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner in Tal Afar, northern Iraq. The log states: "The footage shows approximately 12 Iraqi army soldiers. Ten IA soldiers were talking to one another while two soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound … The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him and shooting him."

The report named at least one perpetrator and was passed to coalition forces. But the logs reveal that the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring such allegations. They record "no investigation is necessary" and simply pass reports to the same Iraqi units implicated in the violence. By contrast all allegations involving coalition forces are subject to formal inquiries. Some cases of alleged abuse by UK and US troops are also detailed in the logs.

In two Iraqi cases postmortems revealed evidence of death by torture. On 27 August 2009 a US medical officer found "bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck" on the body of one man claimed by police to have killed himself. On 3 December 2008 another detainee, said by police to have died of "bad kidneys", was found to have "evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on [his] abdomen".

A Pentagon spokesman told the New York Times this week that under its procedure, when reports of Iraqi abuse were received the US military "notifies the responsible government of Iraq agency or ministry for investigation and follow-up".

The logs also illustrate the readiness of US forces to unleash lethal force. In one chilling incident they detail how an Apache helicopter gunship gunned down two men in February 2007.

The suspected insurgents had been trying to surrender but a lawyer back at base told the pilots: "You cannot surrender to an aircraft." The Apache, callsign Crazyhorse 18, was the same unit and helicopter based at Camp Taji outside Baghdad that later that year, in July, mistakenly killed two Reuters employees and wounded two children in the streets of Baghdad.

Iraq Body Count, the London-based group that monitors civilian casualties, says it has identified around 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths from the data contained in the leaked war logs.

Although US generals have claimed their army does not carry out body counts and British ministers still say no official statistics exist, the war logs show these claims are untrue. The field reports purport to identify all civilian and insurgent casualties, as well as numbers of coalition forces wounded and killed in action. They give a total of more than 109,000 violent deaths from all causes between 2004 and the end of 2009.

This includes 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as "enemy" and 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces. Another 3,771 dead US and allied soldiers complete the body count.

No fewer than 31,780 of these deaths are attributed to improvised roadside bombs (IEDs) planted by insurgents. The other major recorded tally is of 34,814 victims of sectarian killings, recorded as murders in the logs.

However, the US figures appear to be unreliable in respect of civilian deaths caused by their own military activities. For example, in Falluja, the site of two major urban battles in 2004, no civilian deaths are recorded. Yet Iraq Body Count monitors identified more than 1,200 civilians who died during the fighting.

Phil Shiner, human rights specialist at Public Interest Lawyers, plans to use material from the logs in court to try to force the UK to hold a public inquiry into the unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians.

He also plans to sue the British government over its failure to stop the abuse and torture of detainees by Iraqi forces. The coalition's formal policy of not investigating such allegations is "simply not permissible", he says.

Shiner is already pursuing a series of legal actions for former detainees allegedly killed or tortured by British forces in Iraq.

WikiLeaks says it is posting online the entire set of 400,000 Iraq field reports – in defiance of the Pentagon.

The whistleblowing activists say they have deleted all names from the documents that might result in reprisals. They were accused by the US military of possibly having "blood on their hands" over the previous Afghan release by redacting too few names. But the military recently conceded that no harm had been identified.

Condemning this fresh leak, however, the Pentagon said: "This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed. Our enemies will mine this information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment."

The Obamas Party While the CIA Tortures

http://www.opinion-maker.org/2010/10/the-obamas-party-while-the-cia-tortures/

The Obamas Party While the CIA Tortures
13 Oct, 2010
J. Speer-Williams

Is Obama a Congenital Liar & Sadistic Torturer, Or Just a Man Caught in a Job Much Too Big for Him?

The Obamas Party, While the CIA Tortures Men, Women and Children

I could only be called semi-handsome … in a dim light … at 20 feet … many years ago.

Good looks may not be everything, but they can give one a head start in life. But, paraphrasing Mark Twain, “God must love plain looking (ugly) people as he made so many of us.” And, I’d rather be loved by God than look like a young Sean Connery, or how Cary Grant looked at any age.

Still, next life time, I’d like to have a six foot, four inch tall body, with muscular, well-shaped limbs, a fabulous throwing arm, jet-black hair (that later turns to a steel gray), piercing blue eyes, weighing in at a slim 235 pounds, all top off with a kill-her smile. I’m talkin’ tall, dark, and devastating. No more Willie Nelson looks for me, unless I can sing and write music like he can.

If God will give me such looks, I promise to try to win his love, in spite of my gorgeousness. Which reminds me of another good-looking chap, who needs to work over-time to win God’s love: Barack Hussein Obama, once known as Barry Soetero.

Why the name change Mr. Obama? Anybody know?

Not long ago Obama, a relatively unknown African-American, was being sheep-dipped (gaining a new identity, to build creditability) as a Constitutional Law professor (when he – by rights – should have been studying our Constitution) at the very highly regarded University of Chicago School of Law, while he doubled as an Illinois state legislator.

And even though flextime Professor Barack Obama had produced no original scholarship papers on US Constitutional Law, he was offered a tenured position at the lofty Chicago School of Law. But oddly enough, hard working Professor Obama refused tenure, as he must have known he was on a much faster greased track to something much bigger … if … he could only improve his poor teleprompter reading skills of what others wrote for him.

And, Mr. Soetero … er… Mr. Obama applied himself to his trade, which was not statesmanship, but neuro-linquistics. And in time, Obama’s teleprompter reading coaches perfected with their student a slow rhythmic flow of spoken words, broken up with many “uhs,” with the same measured cadence as the words appeared on his teleprompter screens.

Then strangely, in an unprecedented move, the Democratic Party kingmakers gave lowly state Senator Obama a national stage, when allowing him to display his reading cadence at their presidential nominating convention of 2004.

And even more amazingly, the following year, Barack became a United States senator. Then unbelievably, three years later, Mr. Obama became president and commander-in-chief of the most militarily equipped nation on Earth, without ever serving a day in any military. And, unless one is extremely naive, they know that some powerful interests, made Mr. Obama into Mr. President.

The only power, we are conversant with, that has that much muscle is the private and foreign International Monetary/Banking Cartel. And true enough, it was those oligarchs that gave Obama about six times the presidential campaign funds as they did that other republican guy … what’s his name … the one who wants to torture detainees indefinitely.

This rise for President Obama “From Obscurity to Savior: In Three Years” has to be some kind of a record in American politics, and would make an excellent title for an expose.

Those of us who are stuck deeply in the left/right paradigm have no desire to be objective, and are thus blinded to all truth that does not reinforce biased opinions. And contempt for opposing ideas, prior to any real investigation, is sure to keep one ignorant. Remedial work in geo-politics will not open the minds of such people, as they are badly in need of spiritual remedies. Nevertheless, facts are facts and some are attainable for truth-seekers. Such provable facts are the subject matter of this entire book.

One glaring truth is Obama was in the US Senate for only half a term, before he became president. Has that ever occurred before? How did that happen? Who is Obama?

Obama was and is a blank slate upon which Barack’s fans seem to have projected their individual wishes, hopes, fantasies, broken souls, and anything else that fans fancy. But remember, the word “fan” is short for fanatic: one possessed by an excessive or irrational zeal, especially for an entertainment, religious or political personality … or perhaps for a petty demagogue.

What happens when Obama, with rock-star status, doesn’t deliver on the “free lunch” some of his fans have been fanaticizing about?

What if President Obama takes us into expanded wars, or a new war, and further destroys our dollar in the process?

What if Obama’s socialism is only for the super-rich? What if his policies bring on the greatest economic depression in our history? Will Obama’s fans turn against him and his policies? Not likely, and that is the main reason the power structure made Obama their president.

But what if Obama doesn’t deliver on all the promises he made while running for the presidency, like, “I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.”

Instead, Obama expanded the war in Afghanistan, and is waging a new one in Pakistan, and then wins a Nobel Peace Prize. Can someone please explain that to me? Is it because he has brought “peace” to so many dead people?

Obama also promised no tax increases for families netting less than $250,000 a year, then vigorously pushed congress to pass his Healthcare Reform Bill, which promises us the largest tax increases in American history.

“Lobbyists won’t find a job in my White House,” said candidate Obama; but within a month of taking office, President Obama had hired 12 lobbyists. By the same time a year later, Obama had hired 40 lobbyists, for senior positions, including three Cabinet secretaries, and the CIA director.

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones for my presidency,” promised candidate Obama. He even said government negotiations on the health care bill would be televised on C-SPAN. But instead, President Obama allowed no cameras during the secret negotiations he conducted at the White House reconciling the House and Senate versions of the health care bill, even turning down a request by the C-SPAN CEO to televise those negotiations.

Candidate Obama said he’d require all GMO foods to be labeled as such, something 90 percent of the US public supported. But now with Obama as president, we get just the opposite: It’ll soon be against the law to label foods as NON-GMO.

According to the Pulitzer Prize winner PolitiFact, President Obama has already broken over 19 of his campaign promises. Was the man merely ignorant of what a president can actually accomplish, or is Obama simply a congenital liar?

In any case, has any president, in our history, broken more promises in such a short period?

The rudest awakening to the real Obama may be his continuance and advancement of the heinous torture policies of his demonic predecessor, George Bush – The Lesser.

Obama’s most egregious broken promise for open government was his exercise of Executive Privilege, with his refusal to investigate the torture crimes of the Bush administration, or to release a series of photos depicting outrageous US tortures, by dismissing the most shameful chapter in American history with his, “We’ve moving on.”

Moving on where, Mr. Obama?

If you were being tortured by the CIA, Mr. Obama, you’d really want to be “movin’ on.”

Dick Cheney and Bush, Jr. have both since played out their allotted roles in deceiving the American people - as ordered to do – by pretending to complain about Obama’s “softness” about US torture of detainees, a softness they both knew has never existed. This is the way propaganda in an Orwellian state works: Since Cheney and Bush attack Obama for not torturing US prisoners enough, you’re supposed to think Obama is more humane about torturing American prisoners than they were, an utter piece of disinformation.

We’ve also heard that torture can be humane. What’s next, we’ll have to torture to be humane? Yes, this piece of “double-think” is already at work with the presidential proclamations of, “We torture to save American lives.”

But the undeniable truth is since we torture prisoners, other nations, or groups, will now torture our people, who are held as prisoners, a barbaric quid pro quo. America is now spreading – with Mr. Obama’s help – torture of human life, world-wide.

It’s obvious our military and intelligence officers need better interrogators, not more fiendish, torturous, psychopaths from the psychological establishment.

When campaigning for the presidency, Obama promised us that if elected, he’d move America away from fascism, by ending the Bush policies of torture and fanatic militarism in two important ways: First, he’d terminate the practice of sending the so-called “enemy non-combatants” to over 170 foreign military bases for torture, and end the notorious military tribunals that deny detainees basic rights. It was change most of us believed in, but has never come.

The Obama promises to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, and that he would respect the sane restrictions of the Geneva Convention, while he reviewed the American torture techniques have all come to nothing, other than more broken promises.

Amy Goodman, on her “Democracy Now” internet show interviewed political investigator Jeremy Scahill, who reported that, “Obama is still continuing to use a notorious military police unit at Guatanmo, that regularly brutalizes prisoners, including gang-beating them, breaking their bones, gouging their eyes, and dousing them with toxic chemicals.”

This out-law gang of thugs, officially known as the “Immediate Reaction Force,” not only breaks bones, but urinates and smears feces of other detainees on the faces of prisoners, often guilty of nothing more than technically breaking petty rules, like perhaps having two Styroform cups in their cells instead of one.

Information like what Mr. Scahill reports is very difficult to come by, as US torture of prisoners is kept tightly hidden from the American public. It was through an on-going Spanish investigation of the Bush torture camps that much of what Mr. Scahill’s reports has come to light.

Enough data, however, has leaked to the American press to prove the existence of US torture, in spite of its lock-down by the corporate media. In a little publicized report in the LA Times, we are told of some of the tortures of the thousands of Iraqis that have been stuffed into the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Eye witnesses told of not only seeing such things as strangulation, but brutal beating, and the cramming of lit cigarettes into the ear openings of prisoners.

Even Harper’s magazine writer Scott Horton states he has obtained specific corroboration from a highly credible military officer with first hand knowledge of Iraqi men, women and children being raped and sodomized by US soldiers in Abu Gharaib.

Keep in mind that the above tortures took place in front of witnesses; but, there seems to be a number of secret prisons where special torture techniques are carried out by the CIA, without any witnesses allowed, as reported in the Washington Post.

And by Special Order of President Bush, and not repealed by President Obama, the CIA does not have to reveal to anyone who these prisoners are, or what happens to them behind the impenetrable walls of about 170 US prisons around the world. Not satisfied with torturing detainees, US officials seem to also want to leave relatives and friends of the detainees in a constant state of worry and misery, wondering what happened to their loved ones.

Abu Gharaid sections off men from their wives and children, and children from their mothers, except when children are being tortured in front of their parents.

According to a Human Rights Watch report, the US Army, since March of 2003, has imprisoned about 2,400 children in Iraq, some as young as ten years old. Many of these children have been imprisoned for more than a year, without charges or trials, in violation of the Coalition Provisional Authority memorandum on criminal procedures.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and all other oversight agencies have been denied permission to see these children, or where they are imprisoned in Iraq. What is being done to these children, that you have to hide them, Mr. Obama?

Give us some answers, Mr. Obama. Insist that your teleprompter writers print in large letters, making it easy for you to read the answers to us.

In an article entitled US and Allies Torture Children in Iraqi Prisons, Sherwood Ross writes, “Iraqi lawyer Sahar Yasiri, representing the Federation of Prisoners and Political Prisoners, said in a published interview there are more than 400,000 detainees in Iraq being held in 36 prisons and camps, and that 95 percent of the 10,000 women among them have been raped. Children, he said, “suffer from torture, [and] starvation,” and do not know why they have been arrested. He added the children have been victims of “random arrests not based on any legal text.”

And now that we torture foreign prisoners, we’ll soon be torturing our domestic prisoners, and then even torturing innocent American citizens, who are merely stopped for simple traffic infractions. Already almost 400 people have been tasered to death with 50,000 volts of electricity that painfully disrupt a person’s electromuscular system with repeat shocks in rapid succession.

The International Monetary/Banking Cartel, that controls our government, practices incrementalism, wherein each tyrannical step builds on the last, each step logical to those unable to think beyond what they’ve been told by authority and the Cartel’s corporate media.

In the English Isles live some of the most docile and pliable people on Earth, with most of them civilized to the point of being almost as domesticated as house pets. England is a perfect testing ground for the Cartel’s incremental and draconian policies. If a new piece of tyranny won’t fly in the UK, it certainly will not work anywhere else on Earth, except maybe in Canada.

And as predicted, England’s Scotland Yard has been accused of water-boarding English citizens, who are only suspected of criminality, but with no proof of such.

To water-board someone is to throw them into stark panic and utter terror, if not cold-bloodedly killing them by drowning.

To purposely inflict terror or panic on any living creature is a manifestation of a criminally sick mind, a mind that will often cleverly find justifications to exercise their insanity, even if they are not directly involved with such torture.

But thus far, English citizens can only be tortured for 28 days. How long will it be before American citizens are incarcerated and then tortured indefinitely?

Indefinitely? Tortured? America?

Yes, Obama’s new Prolonged Detention policy has gone well beyond the Cartel’s incrementalism, which usually starts out in the UK, with his “no limits” on how long those suspected of committing future crimes can be imprisoned and tortured. Under Obama’s latest un-Constitutional doctrines, the US will be officially imprisoning people, not for any crimes they have committed, but for “crimes” they may commit in the future.

Huh? Yes, that’s right. Obama announced we’ll now be officially (not under-cover like Bush did) imprisoning and torturing people who cannot be found guilty of any crimes … yet … but who may commit a crime in the future. This is George Orwell’s concept of Thought Police taken to unfathomable heights, and only Obama could openly get away with it.

The US corporate media is keeping this piece of Obama tyranny under wraps, so as to not overly shock Obamanoids, who have long been struck dumb with paralytic political naivete. But you may still be able to see and hear Obama, himself, “ah-uh-ing” all about it on YouTube (Search – Rachel Maddow: Indefinite detention? Shame on you, Mr. President).

One civil liberties advocate told the New York Times, “We’ve known this [Prolonged Detention] was on the horizon for many years, but we were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama administration over these powers is really stunning.”

Yes, “stunning” to those who have yet come to grips with a basic reality: The same dark forces who controlled George Bush, control Barack Obama.

Caroline Fredickson, director of the Washington, DC Legislative Office of the American Civil Liberties union said, “Law enforcement should focus on action, not thought. We need to worry about the people who are committing crimes rather than those who harbor beliefs that the government may consider to be extreme.”

After condemning Bush for his illegal ad hoc legal strategy of making up rules as he went, and then trying to make them seem legal, Mr Obama had the gall to say he’d do the very same thing: “We’ll develop an appropriate legal regime (outside the court system to make illegal detention legal) so our efforts are consistent with our values and Constitution.”

Consistent with our Constitution? Did you really teach Constitution Law, Mr. President? In any case, you certainly need better teleprompter writers, Mr. Ex-law professor turned Teleprompter-Reader-In-Chief. One doesn’t have to teach, or even study, Constitutional Law to understand that you as a sitting president cannot legally make-up laws, whether they are consistent with the Constitution or defy it, as does your ad hoc Prolonged Detention scheme proposes.

And how long is “Prolonged, “Mr. Obama? A 28 day imprisonment is the longest period of preventive detainment allowed, under law, in any civilized country in the world. How long is your preventive detention, Mr. President?

Obama spoke of 10 years, but didn’t limit his preventive detention to a mere decade. But does our president realize that 10 years of detention is over 130 times longer than that of other nation?

If such tortured detainees do “confess” to crimes they have not committed, what then? Ten more years of detention until they confess to more crimes they are not guilty of committing? What’s the ultimate solution? More detention? More torture? More what? Have you even thought that far ahead, Mr. President?

Rachel Maddow said, “[Obama's prolonged detention] are one of the most radical proposals for defying the Constitution that we have ever heard made to the American people.”

Vincent Warren, the Black Executive Director for the Center for Constitutional Rights said, ” I was really stunned when I heard those words [preventive detention] come out of his mouth. This has never been done before. It is completely outside the realm of what is constitutionally permissible. It is deeply shocking that he’d even go there, when George Bush didn’t even go there. This is really something that was beyond the pale.”

Author Yvonne Ridley wrote, “This president [Obama] has gone from charming to harming and few have noticed.”

George Hunsinger, professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, in his book “Torture is a Moral Issue,” tells us of the danger torture poses to the human soul, to civil liberty, and to the morale and safety of our soldiers, and marks a milestone in the disintegration of American democracy.”

Is there any wonder that in some months more US soldiers commit suicide than are killed in combat; and, many of those suicides have occurred with soldiers who have rotated out of the theaters of war. Apparently to some, death is preferred to living with the atrocities to which we are all guilty, which began with incrementalism.

This incrementalism of US torture began as flat denials, during the Bush administration, that the US tortured anyone. But even former president, Jimmy Carter has confirmed that we have long tortured prisoners.

“I don’t think it, I know it,” snapped Carter to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights, continued Carter.

“We’ve said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib Prison, and we’ve said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which they have been accused.”

We have been told that the people we’ve interned are the worse terrorists of the worst, a lie on it’s face, when one considers that we, also, imprison innocent children.

In reality, the US military and intelligence agents callously gather up stray non-combatants, wandering around their US destroyed little farms, that border on battlefields, or we pay local warlords to provide us with women, children and men to torture.

Why do we torture homeless people, even children, who have no intelligence data to give, when the infliction of severe pain is logically used as a means of punishment or coercion? Are we trying to punish Iraqi and Afghani peasants, because we hated their former national leaders?

Does not the torture of such poor tillers of the soil engender hate for America, and invite terrorist attacks on our homeland from Arabs around the world? So, what is the real reason for all this rush to torture human beings?

The official reason, given by government authorities for our deplorable treatment of largely uneducated small farmers, is if we torture them long enough, they’ll give us valuable information about the enemy.

But, it’s OUR intelligence services that finance OUR enemies to keep OUR wars going, while blaming Iran for OUR financing and supplying of war materials to OUR supposed enemies in order to start yet another war.

The CIA/Mossad nexus has more intelligence on al Qaeda than all the Arabs in the world combined. So, if we’re not torturing Arab individuals and families for intelligence data, why are we torturing them?

The US practice of torture has to come from the highest command source that we know of: the International Monetary/Banking Cartel.

Why does the Cartel want to torture human beings?

That’s a question best left to metaphysicians; but perhaps it will suffice to say that President Obama, our titular commander-in-chief, is so far down the command structure he has little to say about our torturing of human life, other than, I don’t want to offend the intelligence community. You see the International Monetary/Banking Cartel controls our (their) government through our (their) intelligence, establishment with blackmail, the threat of death, and actual assassinations.

Is Mr. Obama ignorant of the Immediate Reaction Force, or of the wide spread US torture of human beings? No, but he is keeping our shameful, but open secret a secret from the world as best he can, and all reporters know better than to ask him about it.

The Obama administration has gone so far as threatening to cut off intelligence sharing programs with Great Britain, if their High Court releases information to the press regarding US torture methods.

And, Obama, with the help of the corporate media, has proven to be even more dangerous than Bush, with Barack’s ability to portray himself as someone who is “reasonable” about torturing human beings, as if such an attitude were even possible or defensible, as anything short of an outright denunciation of torture is psychopathic.

Torture was a crucial issue while Bush was president, but is now not something much discussed in polite company, lest one be called a racist by the Southern Poverty Law Center for criticizing a black president.

So, we close off our minds to the thousands of constant screams of agony from around the world, as if we didn’t know they existed, or take refuge in such nebulous terms as Enhanced Interrogations, Harsh Interrogations, Rough Interrogations, or an Alternate Set of Procedures.

The Kafkaesque nightmare of the endless enhanced interrogations, practiced by US intelligence agents on defenselesshuman beings, cannot easily be imaged by most Americans, so many feel that savage and inhuman US torture practices do not exist.

But please, declare your abhorrence of the US torture of human life, so as to not inherit the negative karma surely to befall those who authorize torture, commit it, or condone it, either explicitly or implicitly.

The great 17th century philosopher John Locke, whose work was later reflected in our own American Declaration of Independence, wrote, “As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil which they set out to destroy.”

In keeping with Locke’s axiom, a nation guilty of the war crime of torture – even water-boarding – is, itself, a terrorist state. Our government hanged the Japanese military leaders who water-boarded our GIs during World War II.

President Obama has proclaimed our inconsistency with that standard with his curt dismissal of Bush’s war crimes with, “We’re moving on;” which obviously means that since George Bush’s crimes were not really crimes, Mr. Obama is free to continue the crimes our government denies are crimes.

If some of our fat cat authorities were being tortured by our Immediate Reaction Force, perhaps they’d see torture in a different, more honest light; but, soulless men have no empathy for others, especially many ruthless psychologists.

With a membership of about 150,000, the American Psychological Association (APA) condones the evil practice of psychologists tutoring CIA operatives with torture methods, that are used in secret sites around the world.

APA president, Gerald Koocher is an enabler of torture insisting, “psychologists play a valuable and ethical role with the interrogation [torture] of US prisoners.”

Psychologists have long functioned as the CIA’s torture teachers, as proven by articles in both magazines of Vanity Fair and Salon.com.

The brilliant gad-fly and TV personality Max Kaiser reminds us that Hannibal Lecter was a psychologist, and anyone who’d take advice from a common garden variety psychologist might as well have a private dinner-date with Hannibal Lecter, at his home.

State licensing boards that have the power to revoke or suspend a psychologist’s license, should do so when psychologists become enablers of torture, if not instituting criminal proceedings against them for their crimes against humanity.

But neither, at the state or federal levels, have any bureaucrats or politicians taken any effective actions to end our disgraceful and shameful official policy of torturing human life, least of all from our president.

We have failed to delegate power to ourselves, so the usurpers have assumed powers over us, even the power to torture us.

Being a Cartel puppet may prevent you from being able to end US torture practices, Mr. Obama; but outrageous indulgences do not become you or our nation. In good taste, you should probably reduce giving so many dinner parties, laden with Wagyu steaks (at $100.00 per serving), with the best wines and aperitifs, all on the heels of America’s most expensive inaugural celebration in history.

Sir, you have nothing decent to celebrate. In a time of unprecedented public and private debt (you helped to create), a time when Americans continue to lose their homes, cars, jobs, and savings, you would be well advised to seriously begin thinking about some food fasts, instead of fast foods and feasts, to cleanse your body, mind, and soul.

And as the face of our nation, I would, also, much appreciate a few less smiles from your handsome countenance. Until, we discontinue killing and torturing human life, our entire nation should be in mourning.

From Obama’s many broken campaign promises (www.PolitiFacts.com) to his questionable birth certificate, he seems to be a multifaceted fraud put forth and long controlled by the world’s leading banking oligarchs (YouTube: Obama Deception).

Little boy Bush effectively assaulted our moral and ethical values under right-wing cover; and now, Mr. Obama is doing the same thing, but with left-wing pretenses; and that is essentially the change President Obama has thus far brought to the White House.

Not all change is growth, Mr. Obama; nor is all movement progress on our spiritual paths.


POST SCRIPT : Please carefully re-read this entire chapter, so you’ll have an idea of the horror that is going on, and so you can distance yourself from it. Make a firm and sincere announcement to yourself, your Higher-self, and to your God that you deplore torture, and will have nothing to do with it. Distance yourself from those who authorize torture, commit it, or are ignorant of it, and the negative karma they are sure to inherit. Remember as Americans, Englishmen, or Israelis, we are all – at least – tangentially guilty of torturing life, until we ask for forgiveness, and then distance ourselves from it by opposing it, in our minds, hearts, and souls.

(Jack) Speer-Williams is a former Hollywood producer of live stage shows, that featured various movie and TVstars and a graduate of the University of Florida, where he studied economics. After serving honorably in the US Army, where Jack earned his paratrooper wings, he began to see the folly and crimes attendant to the unilateral wars of American aggression. He has been writing about these issues ever since.

Author of Torture Memos Admits Some Techniques Were Not Approved

http://www.truth-out.org/author-torture-memos-admits-some-techniques-were-not-approved-by-doj61392

Author of Torture Memos Admits Some Techniques Were Not Approved By DOJ
Thursday 15 July 2010
Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t

Jay Bybee, the former head of the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) who signed two infamous August 2002 legal memos which gave CIA interrogators the green light to torture "war on terror" prisoners, told a congressional committee that more than a half-dozen of the tactics detainees were subjected to were not "authorized" by the DOJ.

In a closed-door interview May 26 with members of the House Judiciary Committee, Bybee, now a Ninth Circuit Appeals Court judge, said OLC did not approve of the use of diapering, water dousing, forcing a detainee to defecate on himself or wear blackout goggles, extended solitary confinement or isolation, hanging a detainee from ceiling hooks, daily beatings, or the use of loud music or noise.

In an investigative report published by Truthout on April 17, intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said Abu Zubaydah, the first high-value detainee captured after 9/11, was subjected to repeated sessions of "water dousing," a method that, at the time interrogators used it on Zubaydah, was described as spraying him with extremely cold water from a hose while he was naked and shackled by chains attached to a ceiling in the cell he was kept in at a black-site prison.

The OLC did not approve the use of water dousing as an interrogation technique until August 2004. Use of the method is believed to have played a part in the November 2002 death of Gul Rahman, a detainee who was held at an Afghanistan prison known as The Salt Pit and died of hypothermia hours after being doused with water and left in a cold prison cell.

The use of blackout goggles is a sensory deprivation technique. Prolonged diapering was at one time included in a list of torture techniques the OLC had approved of in 2002. But it was removed, possibly because it may have resulted in a lengthy legal review and delayed the issuance of the torture memos. Yet it was OK'd by former CIA Director George Tenet, despite the fact it did not receive legal authorization from OLC.
According to declassified documents, published reports and interviews conducted by human rights organizations with prisoners over the past eight years, the CIA used the unauthorized torture tactics repeatedly on detainees in the custody of the agency. The unauthorized methods and the final 10 techniques Bybee said detainees could legally be subjected to amount to a violation of the Geneva Conventions and federal anti-torture laws.

Despite the fact that the memos have been condemned by Republicans, Democrats and several Bush administration officials and were withdrawn by Bybee's successor, Jack Goldsmith, Bybee still defended his work and said his critics have either "misread" or misinterpreted his legal analysis on presidential power.

"We might have been clearer in some places," Bybee said, according to a copy of the 283-page interview transcript released Thursday by the House Judiciary Committee. "But, in terms of the analysis, I am going to stand by the memo."

Bybee, whose responses to questions appears to be an attempt to absolve himself of culpability, told Judiciary Committee members that interrogators who employed techniques that deviated from the guidelines contained in the torture memos he signed acted without the approval of OLC.

"If the CIA departed from anything that it told us here, if it had any other information that it didn't share with us or if it came into any information that would differ from what they told us here, then the CIA did not have an opinion from OLC, " and the interrogation was not "authorized," Bybee said.

Moreover, Bybee said the memos prohibited the "substantial repetition" of torture techniques, such as waterboarding, which suggests its repeated use was part of a human experimentation program.

Justice Department documents and a report released by the CIA's Inspector General state that two high-value detainees, Zubaydah and self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were waterboarded 83 times and 183 times in the course of a single month.

Last month, the international doctors' organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) released a report that said "war on terror" detainees were used as human "guinea pigs" to gauge the effectiveness of various torture techniques. For example, PHR said waterboarding was monitored in early 2002 by CIA medical personnel, who collected data about how detainees responded to the torture technique. The data was then used in a 2005 torture memo advising CIA interrogators how to administer the technique.

Closed-Door Interview

Bybee's interview was a closely guarded secret. Civil liberties and human rights organizations contacted by Truthout were unaware that the Judiciary Committee had met with the former Bush administration official. It's unclear why Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, decided to conduct the interview privately rather than have Bybee testify publicly before the House panel.

Conyers conducted interviews behind closed doors with former Bush administration officials Karl Rove and White House Counsel Harriet Miers last year about their roles in the firing of nine US attorneys in December 2006. That arrangement was reached after months of legal wrangling that saw Rove and Miers ignore several congressional subpoenas citing executive privilege.

The Obama administration stepped in and brokered a deal between Rove, Miers and the Judiciary Committee that resulted in their closed-door testimony. By urging the former Bush administration officials and the Judiciary Committee to reach a settlement instead of litigating the matter, Obama's Justice Department lawyers avoided going to federal court and taking a position on George W. Bush's broad claims of executive privilege, which the former president said extended beyond his presidency.

Bybee's interview took place about three months after the Justice Department's internal watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), issued a long-awaited report on the legal advice Bybee and the torture memos' principal author, John Yoo, provided to the White House on so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques."

That report concluded that the legal advice Yoo, a law professor at UC Berkeley, and Bybee gave the White House warranted stern punishment, including a recommendation to their state bar associations for possible disbarment.

In the OPR report, Yoo was found to have "committed intentional professional misconduct when he violated his duty to exercise independent legal judgment and render thorough, objective, and candid legal advice."

Bybee was found to have "committed professional misconduct when he acted in reckless disregard of his duty to exercise independent legal judgment and render thorough, objective, and candid legal advice."

But the judgment was softened by career prosecutor David Margolis, who was put in charge of the final recommendations and who said he was "unpersuaded" by OPR's "professional misconduct" conclusion, which faulted Yoo and Bybee for their approval of brutal interrogation techniques that were used against terrorism suspects after the 9/11 attacks. Margolis changed the "misconduct" findings to "poor judgment" and did not make a formal referral to their state bar associations to further review the matter and determine whether they should be disbarred.

OPR investigators added that their probe was hampered by the fact that Yoo's emails from July 2002 through August 5, 2002 - the crucial time period in which the Bybee memos were completed - were deleted and "reportedly" not recoverable.

Bybee said he could not recall whether he took steps to make sure Yoo preserved his emails as required by federal law. According to the DOJ's website, emails are federal records if they:

Document agreements reached in meetings, telephone conversations, or other E-mail exchanges on substantive matters relating to business processes or activities
Provide comments on or objections to the language on drafts of policy statements or action plans
Supplements information in official files and/or adds to a complete understanding of office operations and responsibilities
The DOJ rules for preserving records also said "the unlawful removal or destruction of federal records" could result in "criminal or civil penalties, fines and/or imprisonment."

Rep. Conyers and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, as well as the good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, have asked DOJ and the National Archives to investigate the matter.

Investigation

Conyers said Thursday the revelations Bybee made during the interview are "highly relevant to the pending criminal investigation into detainee abuse."

Bybee's "testimony reveals that many brutal techniques reportedly used in CIA interrogations were not authorized by the Justice Department - the author of these legal memos has now admitted this on the record," Conyers said. "I have provided the Committee's interview to the Justice Department and directed my staff to cooperate with any further requests for information."

Last August, Attorney General Eric Holder expanded the mandate of John Durham, a US Attorney from Connecticut who has spent more than two years investigating the destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes, to include about a dozen cases of torture that had been previously closed by Justice Department attorneys for unknown reasons. Durham was authorized to conduct a preliminary review of those cases to determine if there is evidence that warrants a full-scale criminal inquiry.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York), chairman of the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Rights, who questioned Bybee during his appearance before the panel, said his "disclosures heighten the need for a special counsel to investigate the development and implementation of interrogation policies following the 9/11 attacks and, once again, I call upon the Department of Justice to ensure justice and accountability for these potentially grave abuses of executive power."

The Obama administration has refused to allow the Justice Department to launch a full-fledged investigation into the Bush administration's torture policies, and has also pressured Congress not to hold public hearings delving into the matter.

President Obama said last year, after he agreed to publicly release the Bybee/Yoo torture memos, that "those who [carried] out their duties relying in good faith upon the legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution."

Holder added: "with regard to those members of the intelligence community who acted in good faith and in reliance with Justice Department opinions that were shared with them, it is not our intention to prosecute those individuals."

Bybee's testimony, in which he acknowledges that techniques were used that OLC did not approve of, puts the pressure back on the White House and the Justice Department to investigate, since it suggests that interrogators were not relying upon the legal memos.

However, Brent Mickum, an attorney who represents several high-profile Guantanamo prisoners, including Zubaydah, who Bush administration officials had claimed was the No. 3 person in al-Qaeda and played a direct role in 9/11, said he does not believe Bybee's revelations will result in an investigation or a congressional hearing.

"Everything I know about our government, everything I know about the CIA, Department of Defense and the DOJ, tells me they cannot be trusted," Mickum said. "They simply do not tell the truth. When they are caught in a lie they change their story. We do not have a judicial system that will allow us to take a hard look at what been done and we have a Congress that has been asleep at the wheel."

Mickum added that Bybee's revelations are not at all surprising.

"Judge Bybee has made clear in his testimony that there were techniques employed that were not approved. I have known that for years," Mickum said. "What was done to my client was vastly worse than what was approved in the [Bybee] memo. But I can't talk to you about that because the government hamstrings us by abusing the classification system and prevents me from tell you exactly what was done to [Zubaydah]. My client was tortured before [Bybee's] memo came out. My client was interrogated in ways that were not approved of by OLC and interrogated in ways that exceeded the OLC memo. I believe my client was tortured months and months before this [August 2002] memorandum ever came out. They knew he was tortured and they set about creating a record to make it appear he had not been tortured."

In the torture memo, Bybee asserted that Zubaydah "is one of the highest ranking members of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization," "has been involved in every major terrorist operation carried out by al-Qaeda," and was "one of the planners of the September 11 attacks." Bybee approved the harsh interrogation as necessary to thwart pending attacks on U.S. interests, which the CIA claimed Zubaydah knew about.

The government has since backed away from every major claim the Bush administration made about Zubaydah prior to and after his capture.

Throwing Yoo Under the Bus

Bybee was also harshly critical of his former colleague John Yoo, who he said was "at the White House on a regular basis," and was responsible for all of the discussion with the Bush administration on matters relating to torture.

Bybee said Yoo never disclosed to him that he had been participating in top-secret White House "war planning" meetings. Bybee told the Judiciary Committee that, based on the information he now has, he is "worried" that Yoo was far too close to the White House and that interfered with his ability to provide the Bush administration with objective legal advice.

Bybee made similar complaints against Yoo when he was interviewed by government officials about legality of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program.

Last year, a report released by the inspectors general of the CIA, National Security Agency, Justice Department and Defense Department said Bush justified his warrantless wiretapping by relying on Yoo's theories of unlimited presidential wartime powers, and started the spying operation even before Yoo issued a formal opinion.

Bybee was quoted in that report as saying that Yoo was "the White House's guy" on national security issues and complained that Yoo was "read into" the secret details of the classified Presidential Surveillance Program, while Bybee was kept out of the loop.

In his interview with the Judiciary Committee, Bybee said he was concerned that "John was involved with the White House in a number of apparently war-planning things" that Bybee "was not aware of" at the time.

Yoo did not respond to email queries for comment.

Rep. Nadler said Yoo's "close relationship" with the Bush White House "warrants further investigation."

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