Saturday, May 02, 2009

Five Things You Should Know About the ‘Torture’ Memos

From http://www.infowars.com/five-things-you-should-know-about-the-torture-memos/

Five Things You Should Know About the ‘Torture’ Memos
Text size



ANSW.Trigger.showLogoIfEnabled("AnswerTips_landing_square.gif","");

Judge Andrew Napolitano
Fox News
May 2, 2009

No. 1. I have read the 175 pages of legal memoranda (”the memos”) that the Department of Justice (DoJ) released last week. They consist of letters written by Bush DoJ officials to the Deputy General Counsel of the CIA concerning the techniques that may be used by American intelligence agents when interrogating “high value” detainees at facilities outside the U.S. The memos describe in vivid, gut-wrenching detail the procedures that the CIA apparently inquired about. The memos then proceed to authorize every procedure asked about, and to commend the CIA for taking the time to ask.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t

No. 2. In the process of explaining to the CIA Deputy General Counsel just what his folks could do in order to extract information from uncooperative detainees, it is immediately apparent that the writers of the memos are attempting to find snippets of language from other memoranda that they or their colleagues have prepared and from unrelated judicial opinions that justify everything that the CIA wants to do.

The bias in favor of permitting torture may easily be concluded from a footnote in one of the memos. In that footnote, the author, now-federal judge Jay Bybee, declines to characterize such notorious medieval torture techniques as the thumbscrew and the rack as “torture.” With that incredible mindset, he proceeds to do his Orwellian best to define away such terms as “pain,” “suffering,” and “inhumane” in such a way as to require that the interrogators produce near death experiences in order to have their behavior come under the proscriptions of the federal statute prohibiting torture, and the Convention (treaty) Against Torture, which was negotiated by and signed in behalf of the U.S. by President George H.W. Bush.
Read entire article

No comments: