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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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May 8th,
2009 - List Says Top Democrats Were Briefed on Interrogations |
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List Says Top Democrats Were
Briefed on Interrogations By Scott Shane & Carl Hulse New York Times May 8, 2009 Washington - Congressional
Republicans on Friday accused Democrats of full complicity in the approval of
the Bush administration’s brutal interrogations, citing a new accounting that
shows briefings for some top Democrats on waterboarding and other harsh
methods starting in 2002. The new chart of briefings,
prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, was the
first full listing of briefings to members of Congress and their aides. It
appears to call into question the longstanding assertion of Speaker Nancy
Pelosi that she was never told that waterboarding and other methods were
actually used, only that the Central Intelligence Agency believed they were
legal and could be used. The chart said that at the
first briefing, on Sept. 4, 2002, Ms. Pelosi, then the top Democrat on the
House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Porter J. Goss, the
committee’s Republican chairman, were given a “description” of the
interrogation methods that “had been employed” against a prisoner, Abu
Zubaydah. On Friday, the speaker issued
a statement defending her previous account. “Of the 40 C.I.A. briefings
to Congress reported recently in the press, I was only briefed once, on Sept.
4, 2002, as I have previously stated.” She said she was “briefed on
interrogation techniques the administration was considering using in the
future” and that the techniques were determined to be legal. Ms. Pelosi also noted that
Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., had warned lawmakers that the
descriptions of briefings provided in the new report were based on notes and
recollections of C.I.A. officers. “In the end, you and the committee will
have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what
actually happened,” Mr. Panetta wrote to several members of Congress. The chart shows that in
addition to Ms. Pelosi, Democrats briefed on the methods included former
Senator Bob Graham of Florida in 2002 and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of
West Virginia and Representative Jane Harman of California in 2003. Republicans also unveiled
legislation aimed at curbing any effort to move prisoners from the Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, prison to the United States as part of President Obama’s order to
close the Cuban detention center by early next year. The name of the bill,
the Keep Terrorists Out of America Act, succinctly explained the Republican
line of attack. The bill would put Congress
on record as opposed to transferring Guantánamo inmates to prisons in the
United States or resettling on American soil those cleared for release. Under the legislation, no
prisoner could be moved to any state without the approval of its governor and
legislature and formal notification to Congress. Since April 16, when Mr.
Obama released Bush administration legal memorandums describing brutal
interrogation techniques, some Democrats have renewed their calls for
investigation and possible prosecution of former officials who authorized the
methods, which included slamming prisoners into walls, keeping them in cold
cells and shackling them in a standing position. Mr. Obama has said C.I.A.
interrogators who were told the methods were legal should not face
investigation or prosecution. But he said the Justice Department would have
to decide the fate of the former department lawyers who declared the methods
legal. A report on those lawyers by the Justice Department’s ethics office is
expected to recommend against prosecution but call for possible professional
disciplinary action by state bar associations. Republicans are now mounting
an aggressive pushback on several fronts: highlighting evidence that at least
some Democrats in Congress failed to speak out against the harsh methods;
accusing the Obama administration of endangering Americans by emptying
Guantánamo; and suggesting that the counterterrorism policies of President
Bill Clinton violated human rights. At a hearing on Thursday,
Republican senators pressed Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. about the
practice in the Clinton administration of rendition, in which terrorism
suspects captured abroad were delivered to prisons in other countries,
including some that routinely use torture. “If we’re going to ask
lawyers who were asked to give legal opinions, we’re going to investigate
them, jeopardize their careers, second guess them, look back, then where does
that stop?” Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asked Mr.
Holder. He suggested that if Bush administration lawyers were to be
investigated, perhaps those from the Clinton administration should get
similar treatment. Republicans have been
pressing for more disclosure by Ms. Pelosi for weeks, trying to keep her on
the defensive while bolstering their claim that the interrogation techniques
were fully disclosed to lawmakers. The issue also has repercussions for the
speaker among liberal activists, who want to know why she did not do more to
oppose and disclose the methods. While the new chart shows 40
Congressional interrogation briefings, the details raise questions about the
effectiveness of oversight. The legal memorandums released last month showed
that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times in August 2002, so any
objection from Ms. Pelosi at the first Congressional briefing, on Sept. 4,
would have come too late to prevent the use of a method considered by many
legal scholars and human rights advocates to be torture. In addition, the chart shows
that the entire Senate and House intelligence committees were briefed on the
coercive interrogation methods for the first time only in September 2006. By
that time, the C.I.A. methods had been widely reported and publicly debated
and the agency had stopped their use. External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/09/us/politics/09detain.html |