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Friday, April 11, 2008
The House Judiciary Committee demands answers on torture
When it comes to the administration’s policies on torture, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr., D-Mich., wants answers and he’s planning a blockbuster hearing to get them.
The witnesses, if they agree to appear, is a Who’s Who list from the administration: former Attorney General John Ashcroft; former CIA Director George Tenet; former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney; and former Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin.
John Yoo the former Justice official-turned professor at University of California-Berkeley is invited too. He authored the controversial March 2003 memorandum stating that the federal law does not bind the president when he orders interrogation of detainees.
Recent news reports place White House decision makers and top administration officials at the center of the planning and approval of interrogation plans for suspected terrorists.
These accounts describe what Conyers said is a “disturbing back-and-forth between Department of Justice legal advisors and these so-called “principals” in which Department legal advice was crafted as a supposed “golden shield” to immunize those conducting the harshest of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.”
These press accounts describe torture techniques being physically demonstrated for the “principals” in the White House Situation Room. They chronicle the close involvement of the “principals” in specific operational decisions about what methods of interrogation would be used on particular detainees.
Concerned about the direct White House involvement in these decisions, former Attorney General Ashcroft is reported to have said “(H)istory will not judge this kindly.”
“If these press accounts are true, the sign-off for America’s torture policies came from the highest levels inside the White House,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on the constitution, civil Rights and civil Liberties.
