Bush's torture admission is a dismal moment for democracy
wolfamongwolves
Posts: 2,414
George Bush's torture admission is a dismal moment for democracy When again will the US be able to direct others to meet their human rights standards?
Philippe Sands guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 9 November 2010 16.52 GMT
Although it comes as no surprise, George Bush's straight admission that he personally authorised waterboarding – an act of torture and a crime under US and international law – marks a dismal moment for western democracies and the rule of law. When again will the US be able to direct others to meet their human rights standards? Certainly not before it takes steps to bring its own house in order.
Unlike the UK's coalition government, which has announced a judicial inquiry on allegations of British involvement in torture, Barack Obama's administration has apparently ended the practice – but has done nothing to investigate the circumstances in which it was used by the Bush administration.
Bush claims that the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah "saved lives", including British ones. There is not a shred of evidence to support that claim, one that falls into the same category as the bogus intelligence relied on to justify war in Iraq.
Indeed, waterboarding and Iraq appear to be interconnected, as torture-induced information was relied upon to justify the invasion. Torture may produce information, but it doesn't produce reliable information, as every experienced interrogator I have spoken with repeatedly tells me – on both sides of the Atlantic. It produces the information that the subject believes the interrogator wants to hear.
What is accurate – up to a point – is Bush's claim to have acted on legal advice. The circumstances are set out in a narrative account published by the Senate select committee intelligence committee in April 2009 . This indicates that on 17 July 2002 national security adviser Condoleezza Rice "advised that the CIA could proceed with its proposed interrogation of Abu Zubaydah", following a meeting between CIA lawyers, Bush's White House counsel and the NSA legal adviser.
This was then "subject to a determination of legality" by the office of legal counsel at the department of justice (DOJ). Written approval followed a couple of weeks later, in the form of two now notorious 1 August 2002 'torture memos' authored by John Yoo, currently teaching at Berkeley Law School, and Jay Bybee, now a US federal court of appeals judge.
Bush fails to mention that the advice prepared by Yoo and Bybee – which did not go through the normal inter-departmental consultations – has been subject to devastating criticism. The DOJ's own office of professional responsibility concluded that Yoo "put his desire to accommodate the client above his obligation to provide thorough, objective and candid legal advice and … therefore committed intentional professional misconduct".
It found that Bybee had acted in "reckless disregard" of his professional obligations. Both men escaped sanctions only because an associate deputy general counsel, David Margolis, later concluded that both men had exercised "poor judgment" but did not knowingly provide false advice. Margolis nevertheless concluded that Yoo's "loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client".
This is the dismal, bogus legal advice on which Bush relied, and the fact that he continues to invoke it today says much about his judgment. He would do better to take on board those with first-hand experience of what the embrace of torture might mean for Americans abroad, who recognise that its use by the US will justify its use against the US.
When Bush first authorised waterboarding, says former US Centcom commander General Joseph Hoar, "he sent America down the wrong road, battering our alliances, damaging counterinsurgency efforts, and increasing threats to our soldiers". So much for saving lives.
• Philippe Sands QC is professor of law at University College London, and author of Torture Team
Philippe Sands guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday 9 November 2010 16.52 GMT
Although it comes as no surprise, George Bush's straight admission that he personally authorised waterboarding – an act of torture and a crime under US and international law – marks a dismal moment for western democracies and the rule of law. When again will the US be able to direct others to meet their human rights standards? Certainly not before it takes steps to bring its own house in order.
Unlike the UK's coalition government, which has announced a judicial inquiry on allegations of British involvement in torture, Barack Obama's administration has apparently ended the practice – but has done nothing to investigate the circumstances in which it was used by the Bush administration.
Bush claims that the use of waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah "saved lives", including British ones. There is not a shred of evidence to support that claim, one that falls into the same category as the bogus intelligence relied on to justify war in Iraq.
Indeed, waterboarding and Iraq appear to be interconnected, as torture-induced information was relied upon to justify the invasion. Torture may produce information, but it doesn't produce reliable information, as every experienced interrogator I have spoken with repeatedly tells me – on both sides of the Atlantic. It produces the information that the subject believes the interrogator wants to hear.
What is accurate – up to a point – is Bush's claim to have acted on legal advice. The circumstances are set out in a narrative account published by the Senate select committee intelligence committee in April 2009 . This indicates that on 17 July 2002 national security adviser Condoleezza Rice "advised that the CIA could proceed with its proposed interrogation of Abu Zubaydah", following a meeting between CIA lawyers, Bush's White House counsel and the NSA legal adviser.
This was then "subject to a determination of legality" by the office of legal counsel at the department of justice (DOJ). Written approval followed a couple of weeks later, in the form of two now notorious 1 August 2002 'torture memos' authored by John Yoo, currently teaching at Berkeley Law School, and Jay Bybee, now a US federal court of appeals judge.
Bush fails to mention that the advice prepared by Yoo and Bybee – which did not go through the normal inter-departmental consultations – has been subject to devastating criticism. The DOJ's own office of professional responsibility concluded that Yoo "put his desire to accommodate the client above his obligation to provide thorough, objective and candid legal advice and … therefore committed intentional professional misconduct".
It found that Bybee had acted in "reckless disregard" of his professional obligations. Both men escaped sanctions only because an associate deputy general counsel, David Margolis, later concluded that both men had exercised "poor judgment" but did not knowingly provide false advice. Margolis nevertheless concluded that Yoo's "loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client".
This is the dismal, bogus legal advice on which Bush relied, and the fact that he continues to invoke it today says much about his judgment. He would do better to take on board those with first-hand experience of what the embrace of torture might mean for Americans abroad, who recognise that its use by the US will justify its use against the US.
When Bush first authorised waterboarding, says former US Centcom commander General Joseph Hoar, "he sent America down the wrong road, battering our alliances, damaging counterinsurgency efforts, and increasing threats to our soldiers". So much for saving lives.
• Philippe Sands QC is professor of law at University College London, and author of Torture Team
93: Slane
96: Cork, Dublin
00: Dublin
06: London, Dublin
07: London, Copenhagen, Nijmegen
09: Manchester, London
10: Dublin, Belfast, London & Berlin
11: San José
12: Isle of Wight, Copenhagen, Ed in Manchester & London x2
96: Cork, Dublin
00: Dublin
06: London, Dublin
07: London, Copenhagen, Nijmegen
09: Manchester, London
10: Dublin, Belfast, London & Berlin
11: San José
12: Isle of Wight, Copenhagen, Ed in Manchester & London x2
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
British officials say there is no evidence that waterboarding saved lives of UK citizens, as Bush claimed in his memoirs
Richard Norton-Taylor and Ian Black guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 November 2010 21.37 GMT
British officials said today there was no evidence to support claims by George Bush, the former US president, that information extracted by "waterboarding" saved British lives by foiling attacks on Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf. In his memoirs, Bush said the practice – condemned by Downing Street as torture – was used in CIA interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the US.
He said Mohammed was one of three al-Qaida suspects subjected to waterboarding. "Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport, and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States," he wrote.
It is not the first time information extracted from Mohammed has been claimed as helping to prevent al-Qaida attacks on British targets. Mohammed cited attacks on Heathrow, Big Ben and Canary Wharf in a list of 31 plots he described at Guantánamo Bay after he was subjected to waterboarding 183 times following his capture in Pakistan in March 2003. The Heathrow alert in fact happened a month before his arrest, with army tanks parked around the airport, in what was widely regarded as an overreaction.
British counter-terrorism officials distanced themselves from Bush's claims. They said Mohammed provided "extremely valuable" information which was passed on to security and intelligence agencies, but that it mainly related to al-Qaida's structure and was not known to have been extracted through torture. Eliza Manningham-Buller,head of MI5 at the time, said earlier this year that the government protested to the US over the torture of terror suspects, but that the Americans concealed Mohammed's waterboarding from Britain. Officials said today the US still had not officially told the British government about the conditions in which Mohammed was held.
Kim Howells, former chairman of the Commons intelligence and security committee and Labour foreign minister, told the BBC that, while he did not doubt the existence of plots, he doubted whether waterboarding provided information instrumental in preventing them coming to fruition.
David Davis, the Conservative former shadow home secretary, said: "For [Bush] to demonstrate the use of torture saved British lives he has to demonstrate you can't get information any other way." He added: "We know from Iraq that whenever brains rather than brutality was involved, you get better results." Davis pointed to claims made by one detainee, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, after he was tortured that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, both of which have proved not to be true.
Bush also mentioned Abu Zubaydah, waterboarded after his capture in Pakistan in 2002. Zubaydah told his interrogators that al-Qaida had links with Saddam Hussein and that there was a plot to attack Washington with a "dirty bomb". Both claims are now recognised by the CIA to be false.
Human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC said that, by confessing to ordering torture, Bush risked prosecution. "George W Bush has confessed to ordering waterboarding, which in the view of almost all experts clearly passes the severe pain threshold in the definition of torture in international law."
Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty said: "After the atrocity of 9/11, the American president could have united the world against terrorism and towards the rule of law. Instead, president Bush led a great democracy into the swamp of lies, war and torture in freedom's name. Democracy can do better and, learning from the past, it will."
Syria maintained a discreet silence after Bush's revelation that he had considered a US attack on a suspected nuclear facility at Israel's request in 2007. The 2007 Israeli attack at al-Kibar on the Euphrates was and remains embarrassing for Syria, which is under investigation by the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Satellite imagery showed that the remains were razed after the Israeli raid.
Diplomats said that Syria's silence was explained by its wish to avoid further deterioration in relations with the US at a time of renewed tensions over Lebanon which have set back hopes for a rapprochement under the Obama administration.
Iranian media reported the story but played down the fact that Bush had asked the Pentagon to study an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, focusing more on Syria and his comments on the war in Iraq. Bush's account is likely to be incorporated into the catalogue of Iranian charges against the US.
Bush wrote that the-then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, asked him to bomb Syria in 2007, that he discussed the idea with senior officials but did not pursue it because "bombing of a sovereign state without warning or justification would greatly affect the prestige of the United States". But the following year US forces mounted a commando raid on Syria's border with Iraq against a man suspected of smuggling foreign fighters, killing at least eight people.
US intelligence reports have said the al-Kibar site was a nascent North Korean-designed reactor. Syria denies concealing nuclear work from inspectors.
Bush's account of the Syrian reactor affair is likely to confirm Arab views of intimate coordination between the US and Israel, even though he insisted that he had not given a disappointed Olmert a "green light" to carry out its own attack. Olmert called the site an "existential issue" for Israel — the same terminology it uses to describe Iran's nuclear ambitions.
96: Cork, Dublin
00: Dublin
06: London, Dublin
07: London, Copenhagen, Nijmegen
09: Manchester, London
10: Dublin, Belfast, London & Berlin
11: San José
12: Isle of Wight, Copenhagen, Ed in Manchester & London x2
And if we would have had a second 9/11 you'd all be saying he didn't do enough to prevent it. Oh wait....I forgot.....most of you think he did 9/11 :roll:
He wanted to do even more attacks, can you imagine if he was able to pull this off....The man appeared to love war without actually fighting in them.
"Those who start wars never fight them, and those who fight wars, they never like them."...Michael Franti
George Bush's memoirs reveal how he considered attacks on Iran and Syria
*MUSIC IS the expression of EMOTION.....and that POLITICS IS merely the DECOY of PERCEPTION*
.....song_Music & Politics....Michael Franti
*The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite INSANE*....Nikola Tesla(a man who shaped our world of electricity with his futuristic inventions)
i'm starting to think Georgie actually thinks Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Syria is one big country.
that would make sense... :?
WHAAAAAAA WHAAAAAA !!!!!! whinners and crybabys wake up !
Godfather.
so what? you are saying you are ok with the .gov doing whatever they want to keep the people of the world inline?
is that what we want to be as a nation? we keep hearing about bullys in the news and how bad they are. seems to me, we are the world's bully.
fu*kin A right,our country was attacked and Bush did what needed to be done,all you soft limp wristed people need to quit whinning and try standing up for your country ...just once !
Godfather.
we really need an isolationism period. long term it's not the answer, but maybe for 5-10 years we just pull everything back into the country, tariff the hell out of foreign products, and say good luck world.
I like it.
Godfather.
The country was attacked by a group of terrorists headquartered in Afghanistan, so the president responded by invading Iraq (after making up a reason to invade Iraq). He ignored a report that specifically said Bin Laden was planning a terrorist attack on American soil. He also ignored the UN investigators who found no evidence of WMDs in Iraq. The entire thing has been one mismanaged clusterfuck from day one until present day - how is that "what needed to be done?" Bush did nothing but take a bad situation and make it worse. Thanks to him, Al Qaeda now has a presence in Iraq (where it didn't before), and Bin Laden is still on the run in the hills of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
ah yeah, buck up bronco! you're a real man!
Buy into that shit man... Waterboarding is good huh? Ride 'em cowboy!
lets take over the imddle east, wahoooo!
(as i spit into on the ground)
..was that man enough for you?
My opinion anyway.
Godfather.
It is still hardly ever mentioned that 15 / 19 of the Hijackers were actually Saudis. It is also hardly mentioned that if there were some serious weapons in Iraq, that there's a good chance that they may have come from the US in the first place when they were considered allies of the States in the 80s.
This is why interventionism is a horrible idea. Unholy alliances-- one day another country is friends with the US, the next day, enemies. You can fault the founding fathers for many things, but they had some great ideas as well. Washington hated on political parties and entangling alliances. This country and the rest of the world would be a lot better off without either.
our troops have been captured and tortured , our people have been beheaded and tapes sent to America so they could brag about it...where have you been ?
Godfather.
contractors yes, but they are money whores anyway.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Agreed
This will never happen, our economic and foreign policies are based on Free Trade, it's one of our insidous ways of insuring peace, get a foreign country ( China) so economically dependant on you, they would never think about attacking you, just too much money to lose.
ahhhh but it's ok to kill a money whore...double standards uh Truth, I'll bet the boys from PJ make quite a bit of money so does that make them money whores also and beheading them would be ok as well ?
our troops through out our history have been captured and tortured you know that don't you ?
Godfather.
the recent 60 billion arms deal that the Obama administration recently unveiled with the Saudi's is a fairly good indication that for now they are very good friends.
it's all part of the empire building.
do you ever think our troops have been captured and killed because they represent our government and our foreign policy? a lot of people around the world hate us for our foreign policy and take it out on our troops if they get a chance. i'm not saying it is right, because it isn't.
it is not a double standard. and no it is not ok to kill contractors either. i just have no sympathy for them when they chose to go over there and take a job paying 5-6 times what a soldier makes to work for companies like blackwater, kbr, and haliburton. they knew the risk of capture and they had no business being over there in the first place.
i am not sure where you are going with pearl jam needing beheading. it makes no sense to me, because pearl jam has advocated peace, no war, and has been vocal about their anti-war beliefs. they have made no money by going over there and have not profitted from any defense corporations. so it is apples to oranges.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Wow, you're on fire today. First we're limp wristed, and we're whinners, and now this!?
WEll, this thread isnt really about torture of US troops. It was about Bushs admission that the US used torture during HIS presidency. I like to stand up for my country, but only when they are acting logically in my opinion. Thats why we're allowed to ask questions and vote people out. How George ever got voted in a second time i'll never underst...oh wait, nevermind, I forgot...
Did you ever see the movie Charlie Wilson's War? There was a great bit at the end - it may have never happened and may be 100% Hollywood fiction, but it was great nonetheless - where Charlie Wilson warns people that if they don't clean up in Afghanistan and spend a bit of time and money building up the infrastructure then it would one day bite them on the ass.
I was just making a point about money and those that earn it, and I was just giving you a hard time for the "money whore comment" just joking with ya Truth.
Godfather.