Obama is going to release torture photos:
The Obama administration agreed late Thursday to release dozens of photographs depicting alleged abuses at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush White House.
The decision will make public for the first time photos obtained in military investigations at facilities other than the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Forty-four photos that the American Civil Liberties Union was seeking in a court case, plus a "substantial number" of other images, will be released by May 28....
---------------Some of the photos show U.S. service members intimidating or threatening detainees by pointing weapons at them, according to officials who have seen them. Military officers have been court-martialed for threatening detainees at gunpoint.
"This will constitute visual proof that, unlike the Bush administration's claim, the abuse was not confined to Abu Ghraib and was not aberrational," said Amrit Singh, a lawyer for the ACLU, which reached the agreement as part of a long-running legal battle for documents related to anti-terrorism policies under President George W. Bush.
------------------The photos were taken between 2001 and 2006. All of them predate the 2006 revision of the Army Field Manual, which strengthened protections for detainees and prohibited all physical force from being used in interrogations.
In other potential disclosures, the White House has until May 13 to decide whether to release a 2004 CIA inspector general's report on the agency's interrogation program or file a brief with a federal appeals court explaining why it refuses to do so.
Obama opposes the release. His whole, "lets move forward" narrative and all. I'm disappointed but not shocked. Hopefully the pressure will become too great for him...
Rep. Peter King, a Republican in New York said on Fox news that Bybee should be "given a medal" for authorizing torture:
KING: I think that Judge Bybee should be given a medal for what he did. But even if I disagreed with those memos, these are memos written in good faith. These well written, well reasoned memos. People may disagree with them, but he belongs on the bench. He should stay on the bench. And I think talk of impeaching him or going after him is again the worst type of political vindictiveness.
What has happened to the Republican party? Where is the leadership?
Appears its in New Orleans:
Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao, R-New Orleans, whose father, a former South Vietnamese Army officer who spent seven years in a North Vietnamese re-education camp after the fall of South Vietnam, expressed a similar view.
"I agree we have to look to the future, not the past, but if people broke the law, I believe that no one is above the law and if people violate the law they have to face the consequences of what the law dictates."
But it looks like the Republicans are losing ground. We're making progress, how? Because Freud is coming to bear on the Orwellian language, of "enhanced" interrogation
House Minority Leader John Boehner said in a press conference that the OLC memos outlined "torture techniques":
BOEHNER: Last week, they released these memos outlining torture techniques. That was clearly a political decision and ignored the advice of their Director of National Intelligence and their CIA director.
Conservatives are also trying to say, well "it can't be torture, because we waterboard our own troops to train them." First, its different when you do it once as compared to 183 times...
One of the OLC memos, dated May 30, 2005, quotes an internal investigation by the CIA inspector general (IG), revealing that two detainees were waterboarded on scores of occasions in the space of a single month. In August 2002, Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner put through the CIA's overseas detention program, was waterboarded at least 83 times; and in March 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was waterboarded 183 times. (These numbers were redacted in one version of the released memos, but were noticed in a separate version by Marcy Wheeler of the blog emptywheel.)
But also as Media Matters points out they are contradicting Bush's Justice Dept:
Fox's Jim Angle stated that President Obama considers waterboarding "too harsh to use on terrorists," and contrasted this with its use in training some U.S. military members. However, a Bush Justice Department memo noted that individuals undergoing waterboarding for military training are "obviously in a very different situation from detainees undergoing interrogation."
The libertarian wing of the Republican party and their political philosophy made for an agrarian economy may have taken hold of late, as seen with the tea party bandwagon from Republican officials. But it doesn't look like opposition to torture is high on the list for Republicans...
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