It might be time to accept the fact nothing will ever be normal in the issues of human rights v suspected terrorist threats.
I had hope when Fitzgerald was named by Comey even though there was a substantial history of prosecuting terrorist cases that might have hidden forces behind them. I found evidence to show that possibly those in Justice Dept had closed the gap on the merciless powers who have supported these terrorist organizations.
I had serious doubts when Comey announced his leaving to go to the private sector especially when I learned it was Lockheed-Martin as a chief legal counsel.
Then, I found this
Meet the New Interrogators: Lockheed MartinThe bottom line was undoubtedly improved by the boom in hiring contract interrogators that began just weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Armed with new Pentagon contracts, Michaelis advertised job openings for 120 new "intelligence analysts" ranging from Arab linguists to counterintelligence and information warfare specialists. The private contractors would work at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and at the United States Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida.
At the same time, Lockheed Martin, then a completely different company, was also interested in entering this lucrative new business of intelligence contracting. It bought up Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), a small company with a General Services Administration (GSA) technology contract issued in Kansas City, Missouri. In November 2002, Lockheed used GSA to employ private interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The contract was then transferred to a Department of Interior office in Sierra Vista, Arizona.
The issue of private contractors in interrogation did not come to light until mid-2004, when a military investigation revealed that several interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison were civilian employees of CACI. The contract to the Virginia-based company was also issued by the Department of Interior's Sierra Vista, Arizona office, located a stone's throw from the headquarters of the Army's main interrogation school.
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A subsequent report in July 2004 by Lieutenant General Paul Mikolashek, on behalf of the Army Inspector General, found that a third of the interrogators supplied in Iraq by CACI had not been trained in military interrogation methods and policies. The same report mentioned that of the four contract interrogators employed by Sytex in Bagram, Afghanistan, only two had received military interrogation training, and the other two, who were former police officers, had not.It also emerged that no one knew what laws applied to private contractors who engaged in torture in Iraq or whether they were in fact accountable to any legal authority or disciplinary procedures. When the media began to question the role of the private contractors and the legality of their presence under unrelated information technology contracts from non-military agencies, the Pentagon swiftly issued sole-source ("no bid") military contracts to CACI and Lockheed.
So, they have the former #2 prosecutor in the Justice Dept, Deputy Attorney General who had served under Gonzales and Ashcroft while the human rights abuses occurred. He did step up and order a new directive on defining torture but it also looked like a political move. I didn’t think he was politically motivated and even after this new bit of information, I’m keeping an open mind…..still, it doesn’t look good for people who love freedom…
Washngton - The Justice Department released a rewritten legal memo on what constitutes torture, backing away from its own assertions prior to the Iraqi prison abuse scandal that torture had to involve "excruciating and agonizing pain."
The 17-page memo omitted two of the most controversial assertions made in now-disavowed 2002 Justice Department documents: that President Bush, as commander in chief in wartime, had authority superseding U.S. anti-torture laws and that U.S. personnel had several legal defenses against criminal liability in such cases.
The new document said torture violates U.S. and international law.
"Consideration of the bounds of any such authority would be inconsistent with the president's unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture," said the memo from Daniel Levin, acting chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, to Deputy Attorney General James Comey.
