Torture began at the top

[maddezmom]

Torture began at the top
June 18, 2008


Apart from understanding how and why the Bush/Cheney administration tricked the American people into going to war in Iraq, no question is more urgent than how the White House forced the adoption of torture as state policy of the United States.

An investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee, now partly concluded, already has gone a long way toward explaining the decision to place the United States among the world's pariah states. In a statement delivered Tuesday, committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said: "Some have suggested that detainee abuses committed by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantanamo were the result of a 'few bad apples' acting on their own. It would be a lot easier to accept if that were true." In fact, Levin said, senior U.S. officials "sought out information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees."

Until now, administration officials have insisted to other congressional panels that the government approved the use of "harsh" interrogation methods only after the military commanders at Guantanamo asked for permission to get tough with recalcitrant prisoners and only after serious soul searching.

As the Washington Post reported Tuesday, however, documents and e-mails collected by investigators for the Armed Services Committee show that officials working for then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld began their research into waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices as far back as July 2002, months before military commanders began asking for permission.

In fact, a full month before those requests came up the chain of command, former Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II and David S. Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, flew to Guantanamo to discuss the interrogation of prisoners.

more:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rutten18-2008jun18,0,6744652.column

some more about Jack Goldsmith here:

The Man Behind the Torture: Addington, Cheney's former counsel and now chief of staff
Wed Dec 12th 2007, 09:59 AM
By David Cole
The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration
by Jack Goldsmith
Norton, 256 pp., $25.95

Perhaps the most powerful lawyer in the Bush administration is also the most reclusive. David Addington, who was Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel from 2001 to 2005, and since then his chief of staff, does not talk to the press. His voice, however, has been enormously influential behind closed doors, where, with Cheney's backing, he has helped shape the administration's strategy in the war on terror, and in particular its aggressively expansive conception of executive power. Sometimes called "Cheney's Cheney," Addington has twenty years of experience in national security matters—he has been a lawyer for the CIA, the secretary of defense, and two congressional committees concerned with intelligence and foreign affairs. He is a prodigious worker, and by all accounts a brilliant inside political player. Richard Shiffrin, deputy general counsel for intelligence at the Defense Department until 2003, called him "an unopposable force."<1> Yet most of the American public has never heard him speak.

Addington's combination of public silence and private power makes him an apt symbol for the Bush administration's general approach to national security. Many of the administration's most controversial policies have been adopted in secret, under Addington's direction, often without much input from other parts of the executive branch, much less other branches of government, and without public accountability. Among the measures we know about are disappearances of detainees into secret CIA prisons, the use of torture to gather evidence, rendition of suspects to countries known for torture, and warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

When the public learns of such practices, usually because someone—presumably not David Addington—has leaked information about them to the press, the administration continues to invoke secrecy to block efforts to hold it to account. After The New York Times revealed that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor Americans' phone calls without judicial approval, in violation of a criminal statute, the administration labeled the program a "state secret" and argued that lawsuits challenging its legality must be dismissed in deference to executive claims of confidentiality.<2> On the same grounds, the Supreme Court in October declined without comment to hear a lawsuit challenging the administration's abduction of an innocent German citizen who was taken to Afghanistan to be tortured, and then dumped on a remote Albanian roadside when US officials realized they had kidnapped the wrong man. The administration argued that the litigation would reveal classified information, and the Supreme Court was unwilling even to consider whether it is consistent with our democratic system to elevate secrecy over all other constitutional and human rights values—including the right not to be tortured.



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