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The House Judiciary Committee demands answers on torture
When it comes to the administration’s policies on torture, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr., D-Mich., wants answers and he’s planning a blockbuster hearing to get them.
The witnesses, if they agree to appear, is a Who’s Who list from the administration: former Attorney General John Ashcroft; former CIA Director George Tenet; former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney; and former Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin.
John Yoo the former Justice official-turned professor at University of California-Berkeley is invited too. He authored the controversial March 2003 memorandum stating that the federal law does not bind the president when he orders interrogation of detainees.
Recent news reports place White House decision makers and top administration officials at the center of the planning and approval of interrogation plans for suspected terrorists.
These accounts describe what Conyers said is a “disturbing back-and-forth between Department of Justice legal advisors and these so-called “principals” in which Department legal advice was crafted as a supposed “golden shield” to immunize those conducting the harshest of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.”
These press accounts describe torture techniques being physically demonstrated for the “principals” in the White House Situation Room. They chronicle the close involvement of the “principals” in specific operational decisions about what methods of interrogation would be used on particular detainees.
Concerned about the direct White House involvement in these decisions, former Attorney General Ashcroft is reported to have said “(H)istory will not judge this kindly.”
“If these press accounts are true, the sign-off for America’s torture policies came from the highest levels inside the White House,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil Rights and civil Liberties.
Comments
By Nick Jackson
April 11, 2008 5:41 PM | Link to this
Conyers is on the right track. The Bush administration has been stonewalling so long about its torture policies because they are illegal, morally wrong, and cannot stand the light of day. Despite all the statutory tinkering President Bush’s Republican friends in Congress did with the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, a pristine torture conspiracy provision quietly awaits invocation at 18 USC 2340A(c). Those convicted under this provision face life sentences. Let’s see how many of the invited witnesses ask for immunity before they give their testimony.
By awk
April 12, 2008 10:22 AM | Link to this
Great, so we have a government that tortures people and admits it and says “so” when we’re outraged. Proud to be an American…
By Lily B
April 27, 2008 9:27 AM | Link to this
awk: Exactly. The House Judiciary Committee is now addressing these abuses only because (1) they lacked the courage to do so earlier for fear of being labeled soft of terrorists and (2) it is obviously time to save their own skins with the voters who expected more than lip service. I personally will remember our elected representatives during the Bush years as cowardly conspirators in the erosion of American civil liberties.