NYTimes Bombshell: "Shameful" Torture Secretly Approved by OLC
by drational
Thu Oct 04, 2007 at 03:35:18 AM PDT
In an amazing article in Today's NY Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/washington/04interrogate.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&hp&adxnnlx=1191492029-LIpFCDBaILGMCg0ZCBJgFw&oref=slogin We learn that the Bush Administration's December 2004 OLC legal opinion denouncing torture as unacceptable was secretly replaced in February 2005 by a memo that allowed combinations of interrogation techniques that many in the government felt were extreme.
James Comey, the former Deputy Attorney General who stood up to the Administration over warrantless wiretapping told colleagues at the Department of Justice "that they would all be 'ashamed' when the world eventually learned of it."
Now the world knows about it.
According to the article:
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture "abhorrent" in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Thus after Alberto Gonzales became AG, the memo decrying torture as "abhorrent" was secretly replaced with a memo that approved torture.
...............
The article also chronicles the purge of the last remnants of integrity at the DOJ. Jack Goldsmith, who also opposed the Administration on warrantless wiretapping, resigned as he withdrew the existing Bybee/Yoo torture memo that approved techniques some in the Government felt abhorrent and in violation of international law.
Goldsmiths replacement, Daniel Levin, authored the December 2004 memo on interrogations that seemed to outlaw torture techniques.
This memo remains on the Justice Department website as the public face of the Administration's torture policy. But this memo was in reality in effects for 3 months. By February, 2005, Levin had been transferred,
and Bradbury wrote the top secret memo permitting combinations of severe techniques that James Comey warned would be considered shameful.more at:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/10/4/61351/1881