Prosecute … Or They Will Do It Again
12/15/2014
CIA chief John Brennan told Congress the CIA
will torture again … the White House need only ask.
We are not contemplating at all getting back into the interrogation program,” Brennan said.
As for the future, he said, “I defer to future policymakers.”
And Bush-era legal memos “authorizing” torture are apparently still in effect. As Gregg Levine
notes this week:
But that 2001 finding doesn’t have an expiration date, and there is no evidence of an Obama-era finding that directly controverts the Gloves Come Off memorandum. In fact, there is evidence that the Obama administration continues to operate under that finding (or did until at least 2012).
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Personification of evil: John Brennan |
The finding that authorized the torture program also authorized drone strikes without notable process or oversight. Just three days into office, Obama
OK’d a strike inside Pakistan that reportedly killed 11 civilians, and over the course of 2009, the CIA — Obama’s CIA — conducted 52 drone strikes, killing hundreds. The drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, in 2011, was launched without due process and again, under the legal cover of the 2001 MON.
In fact, in that 2nd Circuit ruling, the court made specific reference to an ongoing program: “We give substantial weight to the Government’s declarations, which establish that disclosing the redacted portions of the OLC memoranda would reveal the existence and scope of a highly classified, ACTIVEintelligence activity.”
***
By not releasing the full language of the torture memoranda, by not publicly issuing a new memorandum that finds the Bush-era rulings to be invalid and, indeed, to keep operating some programs under the authority granted by the people who are now publicly deemed responsible for authorizing torture, there is no assurance that another leader wouldn’t pick up where the Bush administration left off. Indeed, there is no assurance that, given some new terrorist attack or heinous provocation, the current president’s CIA wouldn’t return to the methods they practiced from at least 2002 to 2007 ….
And the fact that the only CIA employee the Obama administration has prosecuted for torture is thewhistleblower who revealed the torture program implies that torture will happen again. Vox
notes:
Attorney General Eric Holder … decided not to prosecute anyone for the CIA’s torture.
***
But the Obama administration has had a different attitude when it comes to those who revealed the existence of the CIA torture program.
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War crimes trials necessary for both Bush and Obama |
Prosecuting people who revealed the program, instead of the people responsible, makes it more likely that abuses like this will happen again.
A leading American constitutional law expert, Erwin Chemerinsky, said:
"Perhaps most of all, criminal prosecutions are needed to make sure that this does not happen again. That would send a message to all government officials: Those who plan, authorize and engage in torture will be criminally punished."
Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said …. “Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of the officials responsible, torture will remain a ‘policy option’ for future presidents.”
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