Bushite Liars: CIA, Hayden, Mukasey Still Spew Lies About Waterboarding in the Face of The Truth
It was the worst administration ever.
As the investigative journalist, I.F. Stone once said: ""All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." That sums up the Bush regime.
Former Bushite flunkies, AG Michael Mukasey and former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden, two weasels who personify Bushite dishonor and dishonesty continue to lie about torture specifically waterboarding which they claimed was used in a limited way "against a small number of "hardcore" prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA."
Sam Stein at Huffington Post wrote: "A Bush administration memo from 2005, intended to establish a legal basis for aggressive interrogation techniques, contains a footnote that actually describes waterboarding as falling within the administration's definition of torture.
"The footnote, found within one of the Office of Legal Council memos released by the Obama administration on Thursday, suggests that officials in the previous White House likely knew that they were torturing terrorism suspects at a time when they claimed to not be involved in such a practice.
"Bush officials also acknowledged in a different footnote that for a period of time, waterboarding was "used with far greater frequency" and "intensity" than advised, so much so that medical personnel could not confirm the safety of the detainees. Authors of the memo said they instructed interrogators to change their use of the technique to make it more similar to its practice in Marine Corps training.
"The May 10, 2005, memorandum from the attorney general's office to the CIA defines torture as -- among other things -- activity where a subject suffers prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from "the threat of imminent death." From there, waterboarding was justified as a technique that, while possibly qualifying as a "threat of imminent death," had "safeguards" in place "that make actual harm quite unlikely." The qualifier seemed to clear the Bush White House of illegality.
"But in a footnote at the bottom of page 43 of that same memo, the authors dropped the formalities. "For purposes of our analysis," the footnote reads, "we will assume that the physiological sensation of drowning associated with the use of the waterboard may constitute a 'threat of imminent death' within the meaning of sections 2340-2340A."
"The admission that waterboarding constitutes a "threat of imminent death," regardless of the safeguards, appears noteworthy. At various points during the Bush presidency, White House officials insisted that waterboarding did not constitute torture. Indeed, throughout the OLC memos, the White House's legal arm sought to advance such an argument."As the NYTimes reported: "C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.
"The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum. Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative.
"A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.
"The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks."The release of the numbers is likely to become part of the debate about the morality and efficacy of interrogation methods that the Justice Department under the Bush administration declared legal even though the United States had historically treated them as torture.
"The fact that waterboarding was repeated so many times may raise questions about its effectiveness, as well as about assertions by Bush administration officials that their methods were used under strict guidelines.
"Michael V. Hayden, director of the C.I.A. for the last two years of the Bush administration, would not comment when asked on the program “Fox News Sunday” if Mr. Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times. He said he believed that that information was still classified.
"The article said interrogators at the secret prison in Thailand believed he had given up all the information he had, but officials at headquarters ordered them to use waterboarding. He revealed no new information after being waterboarded, the article said, a conclusion that appears to be supported by a footnote to a 2005 Justice Department memo saying the use of the harshest methods appeared to have been “unnecessary” in his case."
Such was the tyrannical and inhumane criminal policies of the imperial Bush regime, about which dishonorable Bushites continue to lie even when confronted with the reality.
Why is the Obama administration still protecting the Bush regime?
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