Hi Team!
*? 2 ALL:
BUSH: 'DAMN RIGHT'
I APPROVED WATERBOARDING -
In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that
he personally approved the use of that coercive technique
against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed,
an admission the human rights experts say could one
day have legal consequences for him. - WaPo
WHAT ARE YOUR COMMENTS?*
Greg Dempsey
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SECULARHUMANIST
Voice of the People
======
WASHINGTON, Nov. 4, 2010
Bush: "Damn Right" I Approved Waterboarding
In New Memoir, Ex-President Says He Personally OK'd Use of Coercive
Interrogation Technique that Many Experts Say Is Torture
a.. (Washingtonpost.com) By Washington Post Staff Writer R. Jeffrey Smith
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former
president George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate
responsibility for approving the simulated drownings of CIA detainees,
a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit
torture.
In his book, titled "Decision Points," Bush recounts being asked by
the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush
said was suspected of knowing about still-pending terrorist plots
against the United States. Bush writes that his reply was "Damn right"
and states that he would make the same decision again to save lives,
according to a someone close to Bush who has read the book.
Bush Felt Blindsided Over Abu Ghraib Prison Abuse
Bush previously had acknowledged endorsing what he described as the
CIA's "enhanced" interrogation techniques - a term meant to encompass
irregular, coercive methods - after Justice Department officials and
other top aides assured him they were legal. "I was a big supporter of
waterboarding," Vice President Richard B. Cheney acknowledged in a
television interview in February.
The Justice Department later repudiated some of the underlying legal
analysis for the CIA effort. But Bush told an interviewer a week
before leaving the White House that "I firmly reject the word
'torture,' " and he reiterates that view in the book. Reuters and the
New York Times first published accounts of the book's contents Tuesday
evening.
Since the 2003 waterboarding of Mohammed and similar interrogations
of two other CIA detainees in 2002 and 2003, the agency has forsworn
the technique, which involves pouring water onto someone's face while
strapped to a board, to convince them they will shortly drown.
President Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. have both
said waterboarding is an act of torture proscribed by international
law, a viewpoint supported by a handful of Republican lawmakers on
Capitol Hill and opposed by other Republicans. But the Obama
administration has not sought to punish former Bush administration
officials for approving it.
The 26-year-old United Nations Convention Against Torture requires
that all parties to it seek to enforce its provisions, even for acts
committed elsewhere. That provision, known as universal jurisdiction,
has been cited in the past by prosecutors in Spain and Belgium to
justify investigations of acts by foreign officials. But no such
trials have occurred in foreign courts.
Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights
Watch, said, "Waterboarding is broadly seen by legal experts around
the world as torture, and it is universally prosecutable as a crime.
The fact that none of us expect any serious consequences from this
admission is what is most interesting."
M. Cherif Boussiani, an emeritus law professor at DePaul University
who co-chaired the U.N. experts committee that drafted the torture
convention, said that Bush's admission could theoretically expose him
to prosecution. But he also said Bush must have presumed that he would
have the government's backing in any confrontation with others'
courts.
Georgetown University law professor David Cole, a long-standing
critic of Bush's interrogation and detention policies, called
prosecution unlikely. "The fact that he did admit it suggests he
believes he is politically immune from being held accountable. . . .
But politics can change."
© 2010 The Washington Post. All rights reserved.
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Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
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