Federalist Society Tries - and Fails - to Defend Bush Torture Team
By Jon Perr Monday Apr 27, 2009 6:43pm
Not content with its past role in screening candidates for positions in the Bush judiciary and Justice Department, the conservative Federalist Society is back to defend the Bush torture team it helped create. Ironically, the Federalists' conference call Monday came just three days after McClatchy reported that Steven Bradbury - one of its members and a figure at the center of the storm over the release of the OLC torture members - refuted their claim that the military's SERE training program proved the United States did not torture terror detainees.
As Politico reported, the National Review hosted a media conference call featuring many of the usual suspects among the Bush torture apologists:
The lawyers' group, which was a pipeline for judges in the Bush White House, is hosting a call this morning with National Review writer Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, lawyer David Rivkin, and Chapman University Law School Dean John Eastman.
Their claim, as Politico noted, was that the "much-criticized memos from the Office of Legal Counsel were perfectly reasonable." McCarthy brushed off the CIA's use of waterboarding on terror suspects by proclaiming "they were not going to be killed by the tactic." Eastman, whose university is hosting Federalist Society member and Bush torture architect John Yoo as a visiting professor, insisted the treatment was no worse than that undergone by American service personnel:
Eastman responded to The New York Times's Scott Shane about the use of waterboarding during the Spanish Inquisition and by the Japanese military, and responded "that psychological reviews of graduates of the military's SERE program, in which members of the U.S. military were waterboarded, is a more relevant example.
"Why would I go and look at something the Spanish Inquisition did just because it was also called 'waterboarding'?" he asked.
Perhaps because, as the Bush Office of Legal Counsel chief and 2005 torture memo author Steven Bradbury concluded four years ago, "SERE trainees know it is part of a training program."
As McClatchy detailed Friday, the CIA inspector general concluded in 2004 "there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any 'specific imminent attacks.'" While at the OLC, the Federalist Bradbury acknowledged as much:
"It is difficult to quantify with confidence and precision the effectiveness of the program," Steven G. Bradbury, then the Justice Department's principal deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in a May 30, 2005, memo to CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, one of four released last week by the Obama administration.
"As the IG Report notes, it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks. And because the CIA has used enhanced techniques sparingly, 'there is limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness'," Bradbury wrote, quoting the IG report.
And on Eastman's key point regarding SERE- echoed last week by his colleague David Rivkin who praised "the many measures taken to ensure that interrogations did not cause severe pain or degradation" - Bradbury disagreed. As McClatchy related from the recently released Justice Department memos:
The Bush administration erred by depending on a military training program, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, (SERE) to assess the risks that a suspected terrorist might face when being waterboarded.
"Individuals undergoing SERE training are obviously in a very different situation from detainees undergoing interrogation; SERE trainees know it is part of a training program," Bradbury wrote, borrowing from the IG report's conclusion.
Waterboarding terrorist suspects also differed substantially from its limited use in the SERE program.
"Nobody," the famous Monty Python skit joked, "expects the Spanish Inquisition." Certainly not prisoners of the United States. Not, that is, until George W. Bush assumed the presidency and the Federalist Society brethren Steven Bradbury, John Yoo, Jay Bybee and William Haynes came to dominate the administration of justice in America.
(This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)
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Spring time is a great time to clean out the treason. Good Day.
When they violate the laws of the very document they swore to defend then that certainly IS treason.
Prosecute the top, the middle and bottom.
All of them.
n/t
Only 10 % of the class suffers the Chinese Water Torture treatment the rest just observe. So they all don't go through it or put another way there aren't 266 Chinese Water Tortures in a graduating class.
It may have changed or be different for other services, but when I went through, there was only trainee that was subjected to it. It was too dangerous to be doing to the whole class. It was a very controlled environment and they made it quite clear to us that there would be a doctor in the room.
One thing that no one considers is that not only do the trainees know they are safe, but the SERE instructors are dispassionate about the work they are doing. They are yelling a screaming, but it is an act. They do not have a goal to actually get information.
Even with all of that it was a horrible experience to watch. I cannot see how anyone who has sat in on those rooms could argue that it is not torture.
While driving thru the south I heard a talk duo explain that they were different from other Conservative talk radio because they were coming at you from a Christian perpective. And then they defended torture and repeated BS such as "Nobody can argue that it doesn't work." Heard the rerun on the way home.
Jesus wept.
Religious promotional campains always become corrupted.
My Jesus died from an extended stress position that we are still using today, just short of the point of death.
Jesus still loves these clowns. Amazing!
Nothing more Christian then torturing people to death.
That is the God's honest truth. Since the FUNDIS/SOCIOPATHS took HIS name in vain calling themselves 'Christians' instead of KKK, Jesus has been weeping for the primitatives still left who will never get it.
good stuff 8)
This was classic Python stuff!
Nobody expects talking heads defending torture! Bring the comfy chair!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnS49c9KZw8
I love how they say it isn't torture because the victim didn't die. When the person dies, it becomes murder you flippin' moron. The idea of torture is not to kill someone, but to make them wish they were dead. This country is dead. How there can even be a debate about what happened here is beyond me. IF torture works, that means it is ok? WTF????
............many of their victims did die!!! If not directly, in front of their eyes, they still did, and none of the apologists yet have tried to defend beating a persons head against a wall, raping their children in front of the parents, ................but POT is illegal, you can loose your house, car, bank account, etc.......FASCIST US of BLOODYISRAEL. 'I have a dream............' a great murdered man once said.
when revisionist historians will be reworking Burr's image.
Another branch of a dead tree. Let there be lightning.
But SERE school students have to undergo physical and mental health evaluations to guarantee that they won't suffer long-term negative physical or mental health effects. Also, they have access to a safe word ("Palomino!") if they can't take any more and want the exercise to stop. It will. Also, SERE students do not undergo this procedure while being held indefinitely with no charges against them. These differences count.
said it best.
"If you beat this prick long enough, he'll tell you he started the god damn Chicago Fire! Now that doesn't necessarily make it fuckin' SO!!!" That's why torture doesn't work.
Late,
QSE32
I thought you meant this Eddie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atr4yRv27IQ
In WWII we sentenced Japanese soldiers to death because they waterboarded our GIs. Half a century later, we are as a country discussing the pros and cons of waterboarding?
WTF!!!!!
F*cking pathetic is what this country is coming down to... "land of the brave, home of the free" my ass. My grandpa's generation were able to kick all sorts of fascist ass, fighting AND wining the largest war in all of humankind, without torture.
And these pricks can't wage war against some jackass with bad kidneys herding goats in some remote cave, and a two bit tin pot dictator... without having to undo half of the US constitution in the process. And we still haven't managed to win the war in the two fronts we have been fighting longer than WWII.
F*ck is this it? Is this the time we realize we have hit rock bottom as a society, or do we need to delve even further?
Thanks, Tyler. You said in a few choice words what has been in my mind since I first learned my country was guilty of what we accused others of doing.
Torturing prisoners for useless information reminds me of the old ironic joke that goes "Beatings and whippings will continue until morale improves."
you lose. Bushco turned the US into a loser nation. Thanks a lot George, Dick, Don and the gang!
Actual wording from the UN Convention on Torture.
1 "Torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in any official capacity."
2 "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
3 "No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture."
Neocon torture apologists and cable news anchors both appear to be ignorant of the law. This is way bigger than Watergate and
lots of heads need to roll.
This may be the last WW2 Nazi battle. Read up on the bush family treason tree.
Yes, it is certainly worth the read..... Prescott was the supplier of those ovens used to 'cleanse' the HOMELAND...sure sounds familiar. The Nazi sympathizers were the WALLSTREETBANKSTERS, the GAG, 'Industrialists'...... This is the reason why Charlie Chapman never returned to the US. He hated them, and knew who they were.
You mean Chaplin?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcvjoWOwnn4
Saying that waterboarding in an interrogation context is no worse than doing it in SERE training is like saying that pissing on some stranger on the street is no worse than pissing on someone who is into "watersports."
I graduated from the SERE program in 1979, where I was waterboarded. Let me tell you some things about that:
-Waterboarding is terrifying. I vividly remember it, and it definitely made an impression.
-While I don't have PTSD per se from SERE, it was something I never forgot. And there were elements of trauma from it.
-We always knew it would end, and we knew about when it would end (that is, at some point on Day 4 it would all be over.) That's a gigantic difference from someone who is being waterboarded ten times a day or whatever.
-Those idiots at the Federalist Society have no idea what the hell they're talking about. But that's just standard.
1971 for me. The water boarding was harrowing, along with stress positions and all the other abuse. Even though the resistance and escape portion of the course was only a week long, it seemed like it was never going to end once the techniques began being demonstrated on the "volunteers". For those who must endure the torture for years on end, it must be hell.
Personally, I don't give a shit what the accused have done, nothing warrants torture or excuses it. We're suppossed to be better than that as a people. If they were combatants, then they are prisoners of war. Period. If they aren't prisoners of war, then they belong in our criminal system. I call attention to the record, that the only successful prosecutions were by the Clinton adminitration's justice deprtment, that successfully tried and put away for life a number of terrorists, without violating human rights or due process. The only thing these torture thugs have done is indulge their dark side and besmirch our national honor.
I want to see everybody involved in the process, especially including those who work in the healing arts - who so deeply betrayed their trust, put away for life.
I too experienced SERE school, conducted by the Navy in Washington State in 1969. While I wasn't waterboarded, I was put into stress positions (in a box, half-standing, unable to sit) and put through a POW enclosure in which the instructors could humiliate you, slap you and sleep-deprive you for 36 hours. It was designed at the time to give servicemen the training they needed to face capture.
But it also had the potential to become a training ground for the kind of sadistic pricks that became the petty, chickenshit tyrants that the CIA and Blackwater could hire. The kind that get their rocks off watching other humans suffer.
Although one can be tortured to death, the standard method of the Spanish Inqusition, was that the Inquisition did the torturing, while the state did the executions on pain of community wide excommunication if they refused, which could potentially open them to mass extermination by crusade like against the Albigensians.
That way with the mysterious euphemisims and secrecy of the torture chamber they could maintain the fiction that the church never spilt blood.
in a symbolistic ritual/
Prosecute the torturers, incarcerate them, all of them.
The next person tortured might be your son or grandaughter and it might just be because they registered Democratic.
page or screen as a photo of torture or its deceased victim. No torture proponent should hold any position of authority in society. Apart from the glaring immorality, it is illegal.
This is truly a clear cut situation.
Laws are on the books and unambiguous
United States has multiple case precidents for exactly these violations
Laws have been broken/violated.
This is a Justice, trial, investigation situtation.
Period.
Discussions about "effectiveness" and "legal memo direction" and "Congressional committee investigation/hearings" and "need a non-partisan panel" are ALL BESIDES THE POINT.
One reason we have seaparation of powers and an independent Judiciary is to handle THIS.
Let the indictments flow and trials begin.
That will give Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Yoo, Tenent, and the boots on the ground "I was just following orderz" sadists ample opportunity to state their case, make their rationalizations and clear their names by convincing a Jury of they are "not guilty".
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