Sheldon Whitehouse while being asked about the torture bombshell that Lawrence Wilkerson dropped on Dick Cheney says that if what Wilkerson asserts is true and the Bush administration went outside of the OLC's legal justification for the torture, it raises the prospect for criminal prosecutions.
Sanchez: We're hearing from ex-Powell Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson and he's making the argument that he believes that what the Bush administration was doing with enhanced interrogations was trying to make a case for the invasion of Iraq and trying to justify what happened in Iraq. So you believe that is actually what enhanced interrogation, "so called" torture was being used for?
Whitehouse: I've heard that to be true. There is some further evidence of that in Chairman Levin's Armed Services Committee report. There is not a great deal of evidence that came out in our hearing one way or the other about that. The one things I will say about that is that if that is true, then it takes the application of these techniques out of the protected scope of the Office of Legal Counsel opinion.
Read on...
Peacenik has been surprised by some of the people who don't want the torture issue investigated, pursued, and prosecuted. A lot of people and writers who Peacenik thought were reasonable, have gone all wobbly on the torture story. Their arguement seems to be that maybe torture was necessary at the time. Maybe it did work. This is the problem with you stray from following the rule of law. It is a slippery slope. Just like all the crimes of Wall St.are being ignored. Where does it stop?
It turns out that the reason for torture was to try and prove a connection between Al Queda and Iraq. They were trying to justify the Iraq war. The torture wasn't to stop someone from setting a bomb off in New York City. It was evil. And it just goes to show how thin the veneer of civilization is....in Washington, in the U.S.A., in the world, and right her in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Sanchez: We're hearing from ex-Powell Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson and he's making the argument that he believes that what the Bush administration was doing with enhanced interrogations was trying to make a case for the invasion of Iraq and trying to justify what happened in Iraq. So you believe that is actually what enhanced interrogation, "so called" torture was being used for?
Whitehouse: I've heard that to be true. There is some further evidence of that in Chairman Levin's Armed Services Committee report. There is not a great deal of evidence that came out in our hearing one way or the other about that. The one things I will say about that is that if that is true, then it takes the application of these techniques out of the protected scope of the Office of Legal Counsel opinion.
Read on...
Peacenik has been surprised by some of the people who don't want the torture issue investigated, pursued, and prosecuted. A lot of people and writers who Peacenik thought were reasonable, have gone all wobbly on the torture story. Their arguement seems to be that maybe torture was necessary at the time. Maybe it did work. This is the problem with you stray from following the rule of law. It is a slippery slope. Just like all the crimes of Wall St.are being ignored. Where does it stop?
It turns out that the reason for torture was to try and prove a connection between Al Queda and Iraq. They were trying to justify the Iraq war. The torture wasn't to stop someone from setting a bomb off in New York City. It was evil. And it just goes to show how thin the veneer of civilization is....in Washington, in the U.S.A., in the world, and right her in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
