Santorum Says McCain Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About When It Comes To Torture (VIDEO)

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Rick Santorum says John McCain doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to torture

Crooks and Liars- By David Neiwert

May 18, 2011 07:00 AM

Well, there’s a frothy mixture of stupidity and arrogance for ya:

HUGH HEWITT: Now your former colleague, John McCain, said look, there’s no record, there’s no evidence here that these methods actually led to the capture or the killing of bin Laden. Do you disagree with that? Or do you think he’s got an argument?

RICK SANTORUM: I don’t, everything I’ve read shows that we would not have gotten this information as to who this man was if it had not been gotten information from people who were subject to enhanced interrogation. And so this idea that we didn’t ask that question while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was being waterboarded, he doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’re broken, they become cooperative. And that’s when we got this information. And one thing led to another, and led to another, and that’s how we ended up with bin Laden.

As Justin Elliott at Salon observes:

Here’s a passage from McCain’s memoir in which he describes being subjected to beatings and telling his interrogators false information in response:

Once my condition had stabilized, my interrogators resumed their work. Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I did not cooperate. Eventually, I gave them my ship’s name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant. Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron. When asked to identify future targets, I simply recited the names of a number of North Vietnamese cities that had already been bombed.

I was occasionally beaten when I declined to give any more information. The beatings were of short duration, because I let out a hair-raising scream whenever they occurred.

In one four-day period, McCain says he was beaten “every two to three hours,” and his arm was broken and ribs cracked. So if nothing else, this is a man who can be said to know how enhanced interrogation works. (Santorum, as far as I can tell, has never been tortured, nor did he serve in the military.)

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, like McCain, also gave bad information after being tortured — a point that McCain himself made in a recent Op-Ed …

Ah, but we know that deep in his heart, Rick Santorum is a manly man who could withstand these puny “enhanced interrogation” techniques, just like McCain. Or at least, deep in his imagination.

VIDEO and SOURCE

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Fox’s Chief Legal Analyst: Bush and Cheney Should Have Been Indicted for “Torturing, for Spying, for Arresting Without Warrant”

Fox News’ senior judicial analyst made some surprising remarks Saturday that may go against the grain at his conservative network.

By David Edwards, AlterNet, July 12, 2010 |

Fox News’ senior judicial analyst made some surprising remarks Saturday that may go against the grain at his conservative network.

In a interview with Ralph Nader on C-SPAN’s Book TV to promote his book Lies the Government Told You, Judge Andrew Napolitano said that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should have been indicted for “torturing, for spying, for arresting without warrant.”

The judge believes that it is a fallacy to say that the US treats suspects as innocent until proven guilty. “The government acts as if a defendant is guilty merely on the basis of an accusation,” said Napolitano.

Continues >>

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Report: The CIA Performed Human Experiments on Prisoners Under Bush

Shocking New Report: The CIA Performed Human Experiments on Prisoners Under Bush

AlterNet / By Stephen Soldz

A new report details how the effects of torture on detainees were closely studied in order to perfect ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’

June 7, 2010 |

Over the last year there have been an increasing number of accounts suggesting that, along with the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” torture program, there was a related program experimenting with and researching the application of the torture.

For example, in the seven paragraphs released by a British court summarizing observations by British counterintelligence agents of the treatment of Binyan Mohamed by the CIA, the first two of these paragraphs stated:

It was reported that a new series of interviews was conducted by the United States authorities prior to 17 May 2002 as part of a new strategy designed by an expert interviewer….

BM had been intentionally subjected to continuous sleep deprivation. The effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed. [emphasis added]

The suggestion was that a new strategy was being tested and the results carefully examined. Several detainees have provided similar accounts, expressing their belief that their interrogations were being carefully studied, apparently so that the techniques could be modified based on the results. Such research would violate established laws and ethical rules governing research.

Since Nazi doctors who experimented upon prisoners in the concentration camps were put on trial at Nuremberg, the U.S. and other countries have moved toward a high ethical standard for research on people. All but the most innocuous research requires the informed consent of those studied. Further, all research on people is subject to review by independent research ethics committees, known as Institutional Review Boards or IRBs.

In the U.S., there was a major push toward more stringent research ethics when the existence of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was publicly revealed in the early 1970s. In that study nearly 400 poor rural African-American men were denied existing treatment for their syphilis, and indeed, were never told they had syphilis by participating doctors. The study by the U.S. Public Health Service was intended to continue until the last of these men died of syphilis. When the study became public the resulting outcry helped cement evolving ethical standards mandating informed consent for any research with even a possibility of causing harm. These rules were codified in what has become known as the Common Rule, which applies to nearly all federally-funded research, including all research by the CIA.

MORE HERE

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America, this is Yoo

The Berkeley Daily Planet

Cornell, TP and Yoo

From Matt Cornell
Tuesday April 20, 2010

According to a press release from Los Angeles artist Matt Cornell, students at UC Berkeley were surprised to discover a new brand of toilet paper in the stalls of the law school building this morning.

Cornell made a private donation of ” Yoo Toilet Paper ” protesting the tenure of controversial Bush lawyer, and author of the “torture memos,” Professor John Yoo.

Each roll of toilet paper contains text from the United Nations Convention Against Torture, just one of the many laws that critics say Yoo violated when authorizing the use of torture against detainees.

Cornell says that the irreverent prank is intended to remind Berkeley’s law students that Professor Yoo helped turned human rights laws into toilet paper. At the bottom of each roll is a reminder that “this toilet paper was made by possible by John Yoo, Professor of Law.”

Cornell also notes that his brand of toilet paper is softer and of higher quality than that provided by cash-strapped UC Berkeley and contains “valuable reading material” for law students.

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Revealed: Ashcroft, Tenet, Rumsfeld warned 9/11 Commission about ‘line’ it ’should not cross’

Sahil Kapur, Raw Story, March 17, 2010

Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according to a document recently obtained by the ACLU.

The notification came in a letter dated January 6, 2004, addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet. The ACLU described it as a fax sent by David Addington, then-counsel to former vice president Dick Cheney.

In the message, the officials denied the bipartisan commission’s request to question terrorist detainees, informing its two senior-most members that doing so would “cross” a “line” and obstruct the administration’s ability to protect the nation.

Continues >>

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Investigating Bush’s Crimes
• POLITICS-US: Democrats Divided Over “Reckoning” for Bush
• War Crimes and Double Standards
• Government Warned 9/11 Commission To Not Cross Line

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Lawyers and Journalists’ Group See No End in Sight to the Controversy over Bush “Torture Lawyers”

by The Robert Jackson Steering Committee – 2010-02-23

The Justice Robert Jackson Steering Committee, a group of lawyers, journalists and advocates formed in the fall of 2008 to pursue the prosecution of top Bush administration officials for alleged war crimes while in office, is both greatly concerned and guardedly hopeful by the recent release of 2 different assessments from inside the Department of Justice on whether John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the lawyers who crafted “torture memos” inside the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, engaged in professional misconduct.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17789
http://lawsnotmen.org/

Conspiracy to engage in aggressive and illegal war

Yoo, Bybee, and Disinformation

by David Swanson
After Downing Street – 2010-02-21

Everything you’re reading about torture lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee getting off the hook is wrong. They are not torture lawyers, they are not off the hook, there never was any hook, they may not be lawyers for long, impeachment and indictment are on the agenda, and you have a role to play.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17754

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John Yoo: President Could Order Village Of Civilians Massacred

Yoo: ‘Sure,’ The President Could Order A Village Of Civilians Massacred

TPM Muckraker

Justin Elliott | February 22, 2010, 10:10AM

In John Yoo’s vision of executive power, the president can legally order a village of civilians “massacred,” according to the internal Justice Department report released Friday.

But in a letter (.pdf) sent to the DOJ last October, Yoo’s lawyer, Miguel Estrada, accused the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility of ripping “out of context” Yoo’s statement on the massacre question.

Estrada argues that OPR included the exchange “in an effort to shock the reader and to make clear to all right-thinking people that Professor Yoo is a bad man, indeed.” (See page 5 of the letter.)

The massacre exchange comes during the OPR report’s discussion of Yoo’s August 2002 memo (.pdf) that is widely seen as one of the key opinions authorizing torture.

The document — which is known as the Bybee Memo because it was signed by Yoo’s boss at the Office of Legal Counsel, Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee — argues that the U.S. law banning torture would be unconstitutional if it “impermissibly encroached” on the president’s commander-in-chief power.

An OPR investigator asked Yoo “to explain how the torture statute would interfere with the President’s war making abilities.” Here’s the back-and-forth that followed, which is quoted in the OPR report and was first caught by Michael Isikoff at Newsweek:

MORE HERE

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UK called to account over torture allegations

From The Times February 20, 2010
Frances Gibb, Legal Editor, and Sean O’Neill, Security Editor

Binyam Mohamed: the former Guantánamo Bay detainee's treatment is the subject of a police inquiry (Stefan Wermuth/Reuters)

The Government’s own human rights watchdog has demanded a public inquiry into claims that British intelligence agencies were complicit in the torture of more than 20 detainees in the War on Terror, The Times has learnt.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) says that it can no longer ignore the growing body of allegations against MI5 and MI6.

The commission’s chairman says in a letter to Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, that the Government’s blanket denials are an inadequate response. Trevor Phillips says: “Not enough has been done to reassure the commission and the public that these allegations are unfounded.”

A dossier of 25 cases has now been built up, including complaints of ill treatment, illegal detention and torture. The EHRC is concerned about mounting evidence that these actions were condoned by British agencies.

Mr Phillips told The Times: “Given the UK’s role as a world leader on human rights, it would be inexplicable for the Government not urgently to put in place an independent review process to assess the truth, or otherwise, of these allegations.” He also criticised as “inexplicable” a year-long delay by the Government in reporting to the United Nations Committee against Torture.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article7034456.ece

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Abdulmuttalab Has Been Providing Intel On Al Qaeda

Thanks To Obama’s Rejection Of Torture, Abdulmuttalab Has Been Providing Intel On Al Qaeda

Think Progress- By Matt Duss at 12:35 pm

President Obama’s counter-terrorism approach — especially his decision to publicly reject torture — received a huge vindication yesterday with the news that the FBI has been working with the family of the failed Christmas Day bomber, Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab, and that “Abdulmuttalab has been cooperating with authorities and sharing intelligence since last Thursday”:

The agents and key family members arrived in back in the US on January 17th. The family members met with officials from the Justice Department and the FBI to plan a way forward.

“One of the principal reasons why his family came back is because they had complete trust in the US system of justice and believed that Umar Farouq would be treated fairly and appropriately,” the senior official said. “And that they would be as well.”

The FBI and Abdulmuttalab’s family approached the subject and “gained his cooperation. He has been cooperating for days,” the official said.

A key point here is that there is very little chance that Abdulmuttalab’s family would have agreed to cooperate with the U.S. government in getting Abdulmuttalab to talk if they suspected that he was in any danger of being tortured. This is a clear example of how President Obama’s bringing U.S. counter-terrorism practices back within the rule of law is making Americans safer.

A federal official told the New York Times that “the intelligence gained has been disseminated throughout the intelligence community,” and “the best way to get him to talk was working with his family.”

ABC also reported that “Abdulmuttalab was talking to FBI agents on Saturday, at the same time Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, issued the Republican response to the president’s weekly address, decrying Abdulmuttalab’s presence in the criminal justice system.”

It’s ironic that that Abdulmuttalab was providing information at the very moment conservatives were hyperventilating about the administration’s terrorism approach. The case also indicates that Obama’s decision to try the terrorist in criminal court has not served to cut off any information the U.S. could glean from Abdulmuttalab, as many critics have claimed. As CAP’s Ken Gude recently wrote, “The facts are clear: Criminal courts are a far tougher and more reliable forum for prosecuting terrorists than military commissions”:

The record of recent terrorism investigations demonstrates that interviews with terrorists who have attorneys have produced “an intelligence goldmine.”

False assumptions are driving the debate about the tools available to fight terrorism. President Obama needs to cut through the noise and use the tough and proven criminal justice system as a vital weapon in the fight against Al Qaeda.

Fortunately, it seems the president is doing just that.

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Former CIA Op: Claimed Waterboarding Worked Admits He Was Wrong

CIA Man Who Claimed Waterboarding Worked Admits He Was Wrong

TPM Muckraker

Rachel Slajda | January 27, 2010, 9:33AM

In his new book, the former CIA operative who made the bombshell — and thoroughly debunked — claim that a terrorism suspect was made to talk after one waterboarding session has admitted he was wrong.

John Kiriakou made waves, and supplied the pro-torture crowd with ammunition, when he told ABC News in December 2007 that al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah gave information that prevented dozens of terrorist attacks after being waterboarded once, for about 30 seconds.

The claim was full of holes, and ABC admitted so, quietly. For one, Zubadayah was actually waterboarded at least 83 times, according to a Justice Department memo. And Kiriakou, the head of the man’s capture team, was not present for his interrogation and instead relied on reports.

Kiriakou admits he was wrong on the second-to-last page of his new book, titled “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror,” according to Foreign Policy.

“What I told [ABC reporter] Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” he wrote.

“I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence,” he wrote. But “I wasn’t there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I’d heard and read inside the agency at the time.”

“Now we know,” Kiriakou goes on, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”

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