June 23, 2004

Memo on Interrogation Tactics Is Disavowed Justice Document Had Said Torture May Be Defensible

By Mike Allen and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A01

President Bush's aides yesterday disavowed an internal Justice Department opinion that torturing terrorism suspects might be legally defensible, saying it had created the false impression that the government was claiming authority to use interrogation techniques barred by international law.

Responding to pressure from Congress and outrage around the world, officials at the White House and the Justice Department derided the August 2002 legal memo on aggressive interrogation tactics, calling parts of it overbroad and irrelevant and saying it would be rewritten.

In a highly unusual repudiation of its department's own work, a senior Justice official and two other high-ranking lawyers said that all legal advice rendered by the department's Office of Legal Counsel on the subject of interrogations will be reviewed.

The fact is, we've seen evidence of culpability go all the way up to Rumsfeld. If it's was a false impression, it was one everyone shared.

<free-association>
You are watching what happens when a universally held false impression is planted in a field specially prepared and fertilized to support it. It's like an algae bloom. Or maggots in dead meat
</free-association>

Anyway, check this:

A Feb. 7, 2002, memo signed by Bush saying that he believed he had "the authority under the Constitution" to deny protections of the Geneva Conventions to combatants picked up during the war in Afghanistan but that he would "decline to exercise that authority at this time."

This means the government was claiming authority to use interrogation techniques barred by international law, just that it wasn't going to use them now.

Are we going to let that go?

Military lawyers and policy officials alike were preoccupied during their deliberations by the possibility that officers, intelligence officials and law enforcement authorities could be prosecuted for violating the constraints of U.S. law or international conventions protecting detainees.

Don't you think there's a reason for that? Don't you think that reason is in the thousands of other documents that legitimately can't be declassified? And maybe a few which, like these could have been?

This selective declassification thing is really stupid, by the way.

World-wide people are like, "Oh you didn't know, you just coincidentally want to exempt your consultants from all legal restraint."

Posted by P6 at June 23, 2004 11:11 AM
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