Assuming that 9/11 is the one intelligence related thing that the Bush administration has been honest about and that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed really was the mastermind behind the attacks, it’s a shame that the CIA decided to torture him because we might actually be forced to set him free.
By mid-2002, several former agents and senior bureau officials said, they had begun complaining that the CIA-run interrogation program amounted to torture and was going to create significant problems down the road — particularly if the Bush administration was ever forced to allow the Al Qaeda suspects to face their accusers in court.
….”Those guys were using techniques that we didn’t even want to be in the room for,” one senior federal law enforcement official said. “The CIA determined they were going to torture people, and we made the decision not to be involved.”
A senior FBI official who since has retired said he also complained about the lack of usable evidence and admissible statements being gathered. “We knew there were going to be problems back then. But nobody was listening,” he said. “Now they have to live with the policy that they have adopted. I don’t know if anyone thought of the consequences.”
David Addington and Dick Cheney determined that suspects would never face a judge and so admissibility wasn’t ever going to be an issue. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Their mistakes were so bad that Congress has been struggling to come up with some legal framework that can simultaneously salvage some semblance of the Constitution without setting really bad guys free.
The Military Commission Act of 2006 is one such attempt.
Congress was forced to toss aside habeas corpus, create ex post facto laws, and become complicit in what are ordinarily understood to be war crimes. It was either that, or we set some really bad guys free.
All of this is thanks to David Addington and Dick Cheney. They are two people that richly deserve to go on trial.
