Forgive me if I’m going over ground other people have covered, but as I was going through the 2005 Office of Legal Counsel torture memos for something else, I came across a mention of something I didn’t think I’d seen put out there. Namely: George Tenet, the director of the More…
In the interest of obsessive Kremlinology, something else worth noting from the Washington Post’s timeline of Obama’s decision to declassify last week’s torture memos. Notice that two of the officials arguing against disclosure are White House senior counterrorism adviser John Brennan, a CIA veteran, and CIA Deputy Director More…
In the guts of this Washington Post tick-tock about President Obama’s decision to release the torture memos comes an account of a meeting at CIA headquarters in December between Obama emissaries and top outgoing CIA officials. The agency officials, including still-Deputy Director Steve Kappes, made a case for Obama More…
Assume that the senior officials in the Bush administration acted in good faith from March until August of 2002, when senior officials in Washington were debating what CIA interrogators could and should do to captured al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah. Assume they wrestled with the moral and practical complications of More…
You know an op-ed’s going to be good when it starts out like this:
FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, after consultation with Attorney General Eric Holder, just issued a declassified narrative of how the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel came to approve the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. You can read the report at the committee’s Website, but I want to focus More…
After Philip Zelikow, a former aide to Condoleezza Rice, disclosed yesterday that he wrote a memo in 2005 dissenting from the Office of Legal Counsel’s embrace of the CIA’s abusive interrogation techniques, I called the State Department to get a copy of Zelikow’s dissent. I traded calls for More…
So it appears from the Senate Armed Services Committee report that in 2002, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was rather interested in “aggressive” interrogations at Guanantamo Bay. Wolfowitz — often described, as he is in this NPR piece in 2007, as “an intellectual heavyweight who believes passionately More…
A wealth of new details emerged Tuesday about how techniques designed to help captured U.S. troops resist torture formed the basis for the post-9/11 interrogation policies of the Bush-era Pentagon.
Instructors of those techniques proved to be eager in 2002 and 2003 to disseminate them to an emerging crop of More…
As to my can-there-be-a-decent-right question about torture, Philip Zelikow, the counselor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, provides a compelling answer in the affirmative. His post at Shadow Government is a delicate and thoughtful rejection of the More…
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