2002 memo said torture 'may be justified'

[Czar]

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1576/4817196.html

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In August 2002, the Justice Department advised the White House that torturing Al-Qaida terrorists in captivity abroad "may be justified," and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted in President Bush's war on terrorism, according to a newly obtained memo.

If a government employee were to torture a suspect in captivity, "he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the Al-Qaida terrorist network," said the memo, from the Justice Department's office of legal counsel, written in response to a CIA request for legal guidance. It added that arguments centering on "necessity and self-defense could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability" later.

The memo seems to counter the pre-Sept. 11, 2001, assumption that U.S. government personnel would never be permitted to torture captives. It was offered after the CIA began detaining and interrogating suspected Al-Qaida leaders in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the wake of the attacks, according to government officials familiar with the document.

The legal reasoning in the 2002 memo, which covered treatment of Al-Qaida detainees in CIA custody, was later used in a March 2003 report by Pentagon lawyers assessing interrogation rules governing the Defense Department's detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At that time, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had asked the lawyers to examine the logistical, policy and legal issues associated with interrogation techniques.

Bush administration officials say flatly that, despite the discussion of legal issues in the two memos, it has abided by international conventions barring torture, and that detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere have been treated humanely, except in the cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for which seven military police soldiers have been charged.

Still, the 2002 and 2003 memos reflect the Bush administration's desire to explore the limits on how far it could legally go in aggressively interrogating foreigners suspected of terrorism or of having information that could thwart future attacks.

In the 2002 memo, written for the CIA, the Justice Department defined torture in a much narrower way, for example, than does the U.S. Army, which has historically carried out most wartime interrogations.

Human rights groups expressed dismay at the Justice Department's legal reasoning.

"It is by leaps and bounds the worst thing I've seen since this whole Abu Ghraib scandal broke," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch.

But a spokesman for the White House counsel's office said, "The president directed the military to treat Al-Qaida and Taliban humanely and consistent with the Geneva Conventions."

isolated incident they say

 

[gsaldivar]

Watching liberals try to string Abu Ghraib out as some sort of *CRISIS* in International Law is hilarious. I wonder if they can keep this up until November...?

P.S. I found some REAL torture pics from Iraqi prisons under Saddam's regime on the web the other day. They make the Abu Ghraib psyop stuff look like a tea party. I wonder if i'll earn a BAN by posting a link to them here...

:beer:

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: gsaldivar
Watching liberals try to string Abu Ghraib out as some sort of *CRISIS* in International Law is hilarious. I wonder if they can keep this up until November...?

P.S. I found some REAL torture pics from Iraqi prisons under Saddam's regime on the web the other day. They make the Abu Ghraib psyop stuff look like a tea party. I wonder if i'll earn a BAN by posting a link to them here...

:beer:

Who is worse is not the issue.

 

[LordMagnusKain]

The memo seems to counter the pre-Sept. 11, 2001, assumption that U.S. government personnel would never be permitted to torture captives

Yea, when you are trying to defend millions of people from dieing at the hands of a WMD attack you can justify just about anything.

 

[Czar]

Originally posted by: gsaldivar
Watching liberals try to string Abu Ghraib out as some sort of *CRISIS* in International Law is hilarious. I wonder if they can keep this up until November...?

P.S. I found some REAL torture pics from Iraqi prisons under Saddam's regime on the web the other day. They make the Abu Ghraib psyop stuff look like a tea party. I wonder if i'll earn a BAN by posting a link to them here...

:beer:

hurreeeyyy, the US is better than Saddam, alot of work must have gone into getting to that place

 

[chess9]

Yet another reason why so many lawyers are hated.

Only a moral leper could write that sort of opinion. Sometimes I wonder why anyone in this country believes we have the moral high ground.

Too sad, too sad.

Nice find, by the way.

-Robert

 

[lozina]

Originally posted by: gsaldivar
Watching liberals try to string Abu Ghraib out as some sort of *CRISIS* in International Law is hilarious. I wonder if they can keep this up until November...?

P.S. I found some REAL torture pics from Iraqi prisons under Saddam's regime on the web the other day. They make the Abu Ghraib psyop stuff look like a tea party. I wonder if i'll earn a BAN by posting a link to them here...

:beer:

Perhaps the Iraqi government had similar extremists in their ranks, who thought "torturing [American] [infidels] in captivity "may be justified," and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted in [Saddam]'s war on [infidels]"

and

If a government employee were to torture a suspect in captivity, "he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on [Iraq] by the [CIA] terrorist network

 

[conjur]

Originally posted by: gsaldivar
Watching liberals try to string Abu Ghraib out as some sort of *CRISIS* in International Law is hilarious. I wonder if they can keep this up until November...?

P.S. I found some REAL torture pics from Iraqi prisons under Saddam's regime on the web the other day. They make the Abu Ghraib psyop stuff look like a tea party. I wonder if i'll earn a BAN by posting a link to them here...

:beer:

Perhaps you should go work for Bush's re-election campaign. Karl Rove would love the new slogan:

Bush 2004: Saddam-Lite

"Sounds Great!  Less Beatings!"

 

[Don Vito Corleone]

Originally posted by: chess9
Yet another reason why so many lawyers are hated.

Only a moral leper could write that sort of opinion. Sometimes I wonder why anyone in this country believes we have the moral high ground.

Too sad, too sad.

Nice find, by the way.

-Robert

I don't appreciate this line of argument, as a military attorney. Note that senior JAGs from all four services, up to and including Maj Gen Jack Rives, the Deputy Judge Advocate General of the Air Force, blew the whistle on this very phenomenon in Feb 03, when they wrote a letter to, and visited the New York City Bar Association Committee for International Human Rights, complaining about the Pentagon's dumbing-down of the Geneva Convention.

If anything, I think the prisoner abuses are more a function of Scty Rumsfeld letting his own dislike of lawyers inform his policies - he has been very successful in shrinking the influence of the Army JAG Corps, and made efforts to do the same thing within the other services. This is in accordance with his "Rumsfeld's Rules", which say: "Reduce the number of lawyers. They are like beavers -- they get in the middle of the stream and dam it up."

In this instance, it appears the Pentagon didn't like the advice they got from their JAGs (who said it would be illegal and potentially disastrous to suspend adherance to the Geneva Convention in terms of the treatment of the detainees), so they farmed the question out to civilian attorneys with less expertise on the law of war, who told them what they wanted to hear.

 

[Red Dawn]

who told them what they wanted to hear.

That seems like a re-occuring theme when it comes to this Administration regarding Iraq!

 

[sMiLeYz]

Originally posted by: gsaldivar
Watching liberals try to string Abu Ghraib out as some sort of *CRISIS* in International Law is hilarious. I wonder if they can keep this up until November...?

P.S. I found some REAL torture pics from Iraqi prisons under Saddam's regime on the web the other day. They make the Abu Ghraib psyop stuff look like a tea party. I wonder if i'll earn a BAN by posting a link to them here...

:beer:

Watching dittoheads trying to make excuses for the behavior at Abu Gharib is even funnier. Because theres absolutely no justification for what happened there. "Saddam was worse" doesn't cut it. "It's no big deal" doesn't cut it because it is big deal. At least to Arab world, we're trying to make friends with.

Every liberal and quite a few conservative colleagues agree that the behavior displayed at Abu Gharib was dispicable, shameful and counter productive of the war effort. Only guys without morals like Limbaugh would be so crass as to revel in the prison photos. He's on drugs, whats your excuse?

 

[Don Vito Corleone]

Originally posted by: gsaldivar
Watching liberals try to string Abu Ghraib out as some sort of *CRISIS* in International Law is hilarious. I wonder if they can keep this up until November...?

P.S. I found some REAL torture pics from Iraqi prisons under Saddam's regime on the web the other day. They make the Abu Ghraib psyop stuff look like a tea party. I wonder if i'll earn a BAN by posting a link to them here...

:beer:

You seem awfully entertained by this, considering the 37 people who have died in US custody since 9/11, 10+ of whom have been found to have been murdered. I don't think it's anything to be grinning about.

 

[Red Dawn]

Originally posted by: sMiLeYz

Originally posted by: gsaldivar
Watching liberals try to string Abu Ghraib out as some sort of *CRISIS* in International Law is hilarious. I wonder if they can keep this up until November...?

P.S. I found some REAL torture pics from Iraqi prisons under Saddam's regime on the web the other day. They make the Abu Ghraib psyop stuff look like a tea party. I wonder if i'll earn a BAN by posting a link to them here...

:beer:

Watching dittoheads trying to make excuses for the behavior at Abu Gharib is even funnier. Because theres absolutely no justification for what happened there. "Saddam was worse" doesn't cut it. "It's no big deal" doesn't cut it because it is big deal. At least to Arab world, we're trying to make friends with.

Every liberal and quite a few conservative colleagues agree that the behavior displayed at Abu Gharib was dispicable, shameful and counter productive of the war effort. Only guys without morals like Limbaugh would be so crass as to revel in the prison photos. He's on drugs, whats your excuse?

Even the Dub was appalled by that behavior!

 

[Klixxer]

Originally posted by: LordMagnusKain

The memo seems to counter the pre-Sept. 11, 2001, assumption that U.S. government personnel would never be permitted to torture captives

Yea, when you are trying to defend millions of people from dieing at the hands of a WMD attack you can justify just about anything.

And you do that by rounding up entire villages without a clue who has done what and torture some and murder others?

70-90% were innocent, more than one thousand of them have already been released.

You want to create terrorists? I think this would be a good way.

Where are the WMD's you speak of? Has anything changed for the better because of this torture?

 

[Klixxer]

Originally posted by: gsaldivar
Watching liberals try to string Abu Ghraib out as some sort of *CRISIS* in International Law is hilarious. I wonder if they can keep this up until November...?

P.S. I found some REAL torture pics from Iraqi prisons under Saddam's regime on the web the other day. They make the Abu Ghraib psyop stuff look like a tea party. I wonder if i'll earn a BAN by posting a link to them here...

:beer:

Hey, look at what Stalin did, to call what saddam did "atrocities" is hilarious. :beer:

There is always someone who is worse but the point would be that the US is supposed to be better than this, that is why people are appalled by the actions.

 

[0marTheZealot]

Who ever says that Saddam was worse has to look how he got into power. He was backed by the CIA in the '60s for a coup against the existing government. We are responsible for the torture and killing of his citizens, as we put him in power in the first place.

 

[BaliBabyDoc]

Originally posted by: Don_Vito
I don't appreciate this line of argument, as a military attorney. Note that senior JAGs from all four services, up to and including Maj Gen Jack Rives, the Deputy Judge Advocate General of the Air Force, blew the whistle on this very phenomenon in Feb 03, when they wrote a litter to, and visited the New York City Bar Association Committee for International Human Rights, complaining about the Pentagon's dumbing-down of the Geneva Convention.

If anything, I think the prisoner abuses are more a function of Scty Rumsfeld letting his own dislike of lawyers inform his policies - he has been very successful in shrinking the influence of the Army JAG Corps, and made efforts to do the same thing within the other services. This is in accordance with his "Rumsfeld's Rules", which say: "Reduce the number of lawyers. They are like beavers -- they get in the middle of the stream and dam it up."

In this instance, it appears the Pentagon didn't like the advice they got from their JAGs (who said it would be illegal and potentially disastrous to suspend adherance to the Geneva Convention in terms of the treatment of the detainees), so they farmed the question out to civilian attorneys with less expertise on the law of war, who told them what they wanted to hear.

It really is a shame the uniform military cannot speak out against the abuses of the civilian leadership. Outstanding men and women in all branches of our military (including the horribly abused members of the National Guard, Reserves, and Coast Guard) are being painted with the soiled brush of Bush administration BS. Lowlifes from Perle and Wolfowitz to Gonzalez and Arsecroft are the epitome of "ugly American" yet they send others to do their dirty work.

 

[Klixxer]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
Who ever says that Saddam was worse has to look how he got into power. He was backed by the CIA in the '60s for a coup against the existing government. We are responsible for the torture and killing of his citizens, as we put him in power in the first place.

Who the fvck cares if he was worse or not, it doesn't justify any of the torture and murders committed by US soldiers.

I don't think we need to discuss if SH was a bad man, we all know what he did.

 

[chess9]

Don Vito:

We don't know the real culprit in the Abu Gharib prison abuses, so it's just a guess whether this memo had any effect or whether Rumsfeld was personally directing the methods to be used or a combination of many factors. All are guesses and little more than wild surmise.

Regardless, no lawyer should be advocating torture. Doing so only inflames passions against lawyers, and that is my point. I wasn't attacking lawyers, though there is ample precedent and reason for doing so.

-Robert

 

[alchemize]

Here's a theoretical scenario.

There is overwhelming evidence that a nuclear weapon has been smuggled into NYC, set to go off at 5:00 PM today.

A man has been captured that there is overwhelming evidence he knows the location of the nuclear device. The device is unguarded. It cannot be remotely set. It can be defused if located.

Liberals, what do you do?

 

[Klixxer]

Originally posted by: alchemize
Here's a theoretical scenario.

There is overwhelming evidence that a nuclear weapon has been smuggled into NYC, set to go off at 5:00 PM today.

A man has been captured that there is overwhelming evidence he knows the location of the nuclear device. The device is unguarded. It cannot be remotely set. It can be defused if located.

Liberals, what do you do?

I can't speak for the Liberals but in this scenario nothing is off limits.

I hope you are not using the scenario as a possible analogy, because nothing fits.

 

[Czar]

Originally posted by: alchemize
Here's a theoretical scenario.

There is overwhelming evidence that a nuclear weapon has been smuggled into NYC, set to go off at 5:00 PM today.

A man has been captured that there is overwhelming evidence he knows the location of the nuclear device. The device is unguarded. It cannot be remotely set. It can be defused if located.

Liberals, what do you do?

but sadly reality doesnt fit your theoretical scenario

 

[Don Vito Corleone]

Originally posted by: alchemize
Here's a theoretical scenario.

There is overwhelming evidence that a nuclear weapon has been smuggled into NYC, set to go off at 5:00 PM today.

A man has been captured that there is overwhelming evidence he knows the location of the nuclear device. The device is unguarded. It cannot be remotely set. It can be defused if located.

Liberals, what do you do?

I can't honestly answer your question, because I have never been in that situation. May God give me strength if I ever am. I will point out, though, that the actual scenario you posit strikes me as very unlikely (since we generally don't have "overwhelming evidence," without the kind of details we would presumably want to extract from the detainee).

After 9/11, some people (including Alan Dershowitz) advocated implementing a tiered program for non-injurious torture that could be implemented by someone high up the command chain in situations in which it was warranted (like the one you posit). At least that would have the advantage of requiring something akin to a search warrant, rather than relying on the discretion of the interrogators, but it would create delay.

This is the scenario that inspired Israeli intelligence to implement their "ticking bomb" use of limited torture, to save lives from imminent death and destruction. They have experienced problems with limiting the use of torture to these kinds of situations - to some degree it inevitably becomes a slippery slope.

The problem with this question, in this context, of course, is that the overwhelming majority of the inmates at Abu Ghraib were not high-level terrorist or Baathite operatives; they were, in the words of ICRC, "the usual suspects," and something like 80% were innocent of any recent offense. It appears that abuses were not limited to "ticking bomb" scenarios, but extended to all kinds of people, in all kinds of situations.

Whatever you might think of the source, Seymour Hirsch's New Yorker article on this very issue is fascinating. He paints a CIA that was very uncomfortable using interrogation techniques developed for al Quada operatives in Afghanistan against random civilians in Iraq.

 

[alchemize]

Klixxer: Dodge
Czar: Weave
Don_Vito: Analytical dodge and weave

 

[Klixxer]

Originally posted by: alchemize
Klixxer: Dodge
Czar: Weave
Don_Vito: Analytical dodge and weave

Did you read my post? I answered your question but also reminded you that this was a purely theoretical situation that has nothing to do with the current situation.

I said that nothing is off limits in that theoretical scenario, how is that a dodge? I can't claim to speak for Liberals though.