Yoo, Addington to Testify Before Congress About Torture

Tue, 25 Jun 2008 01:16:44 GMT

posted by thepublicrecord
Two of the architects of the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” policies will testify Thursday before a House subcommittee investigating the legal framework behind the brutal interrogation methods used against detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and John Yoo, a former deputy attorney general in Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), are scheduled to appear at a hearing convened by the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, on the 21st anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment.

"Both Addington and Yoo were integral to the formation of the Bush administration's war on terror policies," said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA. "Now they have an opportunity, no, a duty to the American people to provide their comprehensive knowledge of how Bush administration officials crafted and justified policies that led to torture."

Yoo, now a constitutional law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of the infamous Aug. 1, 2002, "torture memo" that formed the legal basis for so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques against alleged high-level terrorist detainees.

Addington participated in meetings at the White House in the summer of 2002 where he and other senior administration officials discussed specific methods interrogators could use to extract information from prisoners about terrorist plans against the United States.

Thursday’s congressional subcommittee hearing comes a week after a series of disclosures by former Pentagon and Bush administration officials that the interrogation techniques used against detainees appeared to be illegal and that administration officials ignored their warnings.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Wilkerson testified before the panel last week. He said Addington and others in the Office of the Vice President knew Guantanamo Bay detainees were being tortured by their interrogators and likely approved it.

"At what level did American leadership fail?" Wilkerson said during last week's hearing. "I believe it failed at the highest levels of the Pentagon, in the Vice President's Office and perhaps even in the Oval Office."

Wilkerson testified that he believed detainees were murdered while in custody.

"“I needed to balance in my own mind the overwhelming evidence that my own government had sanctioned abuse and torture, which at its worse had led to the murder of 25 detainees and at least 100 detainee deaths," Wilkerson said. "We have murdered at least 25 people in detention. That was the clear low point [lower end of the range] of the evidence.”

On Tuesday, the subcommittee approved a subpoena for Douglas Feith, the former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Feith was scheduled to testify along with Wilkerson last week but failed to appear. Feith was a member of a Defense Department working group that developed interrogation techniques.

Documents made public last week by the Senate Armed Services Committee undercut assertions by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior administration officials who have blamed cruel treatment of detainees on "a few bad apples" who acted on their own.

Instead, the documents show that the pattern of humiliation, abuse and even torture inflicted on detainees was a deliberate policy of the Bush administration – debated by mid-level lawyers at the CIA and the Pentagon, given legal cover at the Justice Department and approved at the highest levels of government.

Yoo is likely to face questions from committee members about a statute governing health benefits he used to define the legal limits of torture, aides to Democratic Judiciary Committee members said.

Yoo's legal opinion stated that unless the amount of pain administered to a detainee results in injury "such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions" than the interrogation technique could not be defined as torture.

The memo was withdrawn in 2004 by former OLC head Jack Goldsmith who wrote in his book The Terror Presidency that Yoo's "torture memo" was "legally flawed," sloppily written, and called into question whether the White House was provided with sound legal advice.

The 2000 health benefits statute Yoo used "defined an ‘emergency medical condition’ that warranted certain health benefits as a condition ‘manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including severe pain)’ such that the absence of immediate medical care might reasonably be thought to result in death, organ failure, or impairment of bodily function," Goldsmith wrote in The Terror Presidency.

“The health benefits statute's use of ‘severe pain’ had no relationship whatsoever to the torture statute. And even if it did, the health benefit statute did not define ‘severe pain.’ Rather it used the term ‘severe pain’ as a sign of an emergency medical condition that, if not treated, might cause organ failure and the like.... OLC’s clumsily definitional arbitrage didn't seem even in the ballpark."

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) confirmed in February that is had been investigating whether Yoo and other OLC attorneys involved in the drafting of the torture memos gave the White House poor legal advice.

Judiciary committee aides said Addington is likely to be questioned about his role in crafting the interrogation policies, as well as a July 2002 White House meeting where he, then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, Yoo, Vice President Dick Cheney, and unknown CIA officials discussed whether the CIA could interrogate alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah more aggressively.

It was at this July 2002 meeting where Yoo, Gonzales and Addington gave the CIA the green light to use a wide variety of techniques, including waterboarding, on Zubaydah and other detainees at several secret prisons to "break" them and force them to cooperate with interrogators.

The Abu Zubaydah case was the first time that waterboarding was used against a prisoner in the “war on terror,” according to Pentagon and Justice Department documents, news reports and several books written about the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.

In The One Percent Doctrine, author Ron Suskind reported that President George W. Bush had become obsessed with Zubaydah and the information he might have about pending terrorist plots against the United States.

"Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"

The waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah was videotaped, but that record was destroyed in November 2005 after the Washington Post published a story that exposed the CIA's use of so-called "black site" prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects.

On Aug. 1, 2002, less than a month after the meeting Addington participated in at the White House, Yoo drafted a memo to Gonzales that was signed by Jay Bybee, the assistant attorney general.
That memo declared that President Bush had the legal authority to allow CIA interrogators to employ harsh tactics to extract information from detainees. Human rights organizations and Democratic and Republican lawmakers have characterized the methods outlined in the Yoo memo as torture.

Dick Cheney's Lesbian Daughter is Now Pregnant

Wed, 7 Dec 2006 21:59:03 GMT

posted by The_Zimbio_Team
Conservatives are up in arms about this one...

Linked from http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/la-na-baby7dec07,1,3293192.story?coll=la-news-politics-national&track=crosspromo
---
News that Cheney's lesbian daughter, Mary, is pregnant has therefore touched a nerve, as advocates for conservative values struggle to reconcile their loyalty to the Cheneys with their visceral opposition to same-sex relationships and particularly to raising a child without a father.

Welcome to our blog about The One Percent Doctrine

Mon, 20 Jun 2006 20:37:41 GMT

posted by Tony
This is our group blog, which is unique because any Zimbio member can post an entry to it. Some members blog about recent news and trends related to the portal topic, others recount relevant personal stories. You can also comment on and rate existing blog entries, to voice your opinion and to help the community identify which members and entries on the portal are must-reads. Got an interesting idea or story to share with other members of this portal? Well, then put on your journalist's cap and add your own blog entry!

The One Percent Doctrine in stores today

Mon, 20 Jun 2006 20:57:12 GMT

posted by Tony

The new book is in stores today. The 1% Doctrine provides "unflattering" descriptions of the Bush administration's war on terror.

It will be interesting to see how this book (and the media buzz that it generates) will influence political races across the country.

Guess whose coming to dinner, Republican style

Thu, 8 Dec 2006 16:43:40 GMT

posted by marypierce13
Mary Cheney is pregnant. I have somewhat of an obsession with the Cheney family. I think that it is because I am from a Western, gun slinging, pro life rally attending, bloody fetuses in the air, Republican family myself. And my name happens to be Mary. I am a lesbian. Hmmm, so maybe I am really just fascinated with myself????

I found the right wing blogosphere reaction to this story pretty interesting. They are just tripping over themselves to condemn them. Robert Knight has said that “the child was conceived with the express purpose of denying it a father.” It is my contention that the Right Wing is perfectly ok with gays and lesbians as long as we are ashamed and closeted. I think it is pretty clear now that there were Republican operatives who knew that both Haggard and Foley were gay. But they weren’t open about it. They were being good boys playing the Republican game. Bibles in the daytime, prostitutes and underage boys at night.

It is when we live our lives in a proud manner, create families and refuse to be silenced that they get all hot and bothered. I think the right wing is much more comfortable with a devastated preacher and disgraced congressman than they are with a happily, pregnant woman and her partner.

I noticed this when I came out at my first professional job a few years ago. The bank’s gay and lesbian resource group invited everyone to come out at work. And so I did. The reaction from my colleagues was great. I was given a lot of support, and I noticed I had produced a bit of intrigued. People were pretty curious about this lifestyle. But the minute I mentioned that I would like to have a wife and family some day, it was a completely different story. I was hushed up pretty quickly. People just did not want to hear it.

Any way, congratulations to Mary and Heather. Mary, listen to me – get the epidural.

The One Percent Doctrine - Articles - Zimbio

Yoo, Addington to Testify Before Congress About Torture

Dick Cheney's Lesbian Daughter is Now Pregnant

Welcome to our blog about The One Percent Doctrine

The One Percent Doctrine in stores today

Guess whose coming to dinner, Republican style