Let’s see if I have the chain of events that led to this searing SASC report on American use of torture techniques on prisoners in order here:

1.  A doctrine against torture was championed by the US for decades, including through codification proceedings for Geneva Conventions and other international treaties that we helped enact as a preventative measure against our own troops and those of our allies being tortured.  Because torture is bad and wrong.  We know this from farther back than George Washington’s day, and he set the standard that American troops would not torture British captives. This has been US military standard as codified in the UCMJ for years.

2.  The Chinese and North Koreans torture captured American troops during the Korean conflict.

3.  In order to prepare elite US covert ops troops to resist such techniques, they are reverse engineered so that some training — in a highly controlled, limited environment with safety considerations built in as preparation for potential torture — can be done.

4.  At this point, torture is still something evil done by rogue nations (others) against the fighters for truth, justice and the American way (us). 

5.  9/11 occurs.

6.  SERE techniques are asked to be reverse-engineered as interrogation techniques to be used against US captives.  (No one bothers to ask where we got them?)

7.  Through some craven mind trick, legal justification for torture is written up despite torture being illegal under US and international law in the very treaties that the US wrote only a few decades ago. Administration officials and their political allies defend it vociferously.

8.  Because it’s not torture because Dick Cheney says so.

I don’t even know what to say to something so searingly SEREingly illogical.  And evil.

So I’ll leave it to the Senate Armed Services Committee report to explain implications:

The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies and compromised our moral authority.

Much more on this to come today. (more…)

So unusual that Whitehouse and Durbin spell it out exactly why this is outside the norms of usual DOJ procedure in black and white in their letter.

Within the Beltway, that’s what I like to call stating the obvious. 

Because the oblivious Villagers don’t always understand why it ought to be obvious to them that it might be either illegal, wrong, a cover-up or worse.

Ethics and rule of law are a lost art, I fear.

Marcy hit this a bit yesterday, but I wanted to focus on a single paragraph from the Whitehouse/Durbin letter, because it smells so much like CYA (PDF) that it needs magnification:

Your letter does not indicate whether Stephen Bradbury was recused from reviewing and providing comments on the draft report. Mr. Bradbury, who was then Principle Deputy Assistant Attorney General of OLC, is reportedly a subject of the OPR investigation. As such, it would appear to be a conflict of interest for Mr. Bradbury to review and comment on the OPR memorandum on the OLC’s behalf. We note that on January 15, 2009, Mr. Bradbury issued a "Memorandum for the Files" criticizing OLC opinions issued in 2001-2003. He wrote that the January 15th memorandum and a previous memorandum were not "intended to suggest in any way that the attorneys involved in the preparation of the opinions in question did not satisfy all applicable standards of professional responsibility." If Mr. Bradbury did review the OPR report, this could have improperly influenced the opinions he expressed on OLC’s behalf in the January 15th memorandum, particularly his decision to emphasize that the authors of discredited OLC opinions on detainee issues had not necessarily violated their professional responsibilities.

Smells like CYA to me. Of course, it has for a while. You? (more…)

Congressional Republicans are telling Dick Cheney to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input.

Displeased with the former vice-president’s recent media appearances, Republican lawmakers say he’s hurting GOP efforts to reinvent itself after back-to-back electoral drubbings….

How can the GOP craft a convincing lie to manipulate the American public into forgetting they supported your every whim and fancy for years on end when you keep showing up in their newspapers and living rooms on teevee, Dick?

How can the GOP run the hell away from you and your record of abysmal, craptastic Dick ick when you won’t STFU and conveniently disappear, putting their political needs ahead of your own?

Who thinks that’s going to sit well with Unka Shooter and his ginormous ego?

Popcorn, anyone? (more…)

During President Obama’s interview with 60 Minutes, Steve Kroft hit the Dick Cheney reputation rehab tour head on. And Obama responded bluntly and without hesitation in a measured, precisely targeted way that was a sight to behold…

PRESIDENT OBAMA:

Why won’t he just go away? In his first television interview since leaving office, former Vice President Dick Cheney will appear Sunday, March 15 exclusively on State of the Union with John King.

The House Judiciary Committee will question Karl Rove and Harriet Miers regarding two distinct but interrelated subjects: the USAtty firings and the Siegelman prosecution. As Marcy reported, the questioning will be done on the record, transcribed and given under penalty of perjury. More importantly, the committee will also receive all of the documents they’ve been requesting for quite some time prior to the testimony, including a number of missing e-mails.

Uber-neoconman Richard Perle yesterday in DC: In real life, Perle was the ideological architect of the Iraq war and of the Bush doctrine of preemptive attack. But at yesterday’s forum of foreign policy intellectuals, he created a fantastic world in which: 1. Perle is not a neoconservative. 2. Neoconservatives do not exist. 3. Even if neoconservatives did exist, they certainly couldn’t be blamed for the disasters of the past eight years. “There is no such thing as a neoconservative foreign policy,” Perle informed the gathering, hosted by National Interest magazine. “It is a left critique of what is believed by the commentator to be a right-wing policy.”

Let’s take a closer look at the latest round of reporting on the as-yet-still-not-released OPR report on legal reasoning (or lack thereof) at the Bush/Cheney OLC. On the heels of Isikoff’s Saturday leakfest, Newsweek coughs up with some intriguing tidbits…