I am going to make an unusual request. Last Friday, the President of the United States admitted that he knew and approved of his National Security Committee holding ‘Principals Meetings’ where various forms of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques‘ were choreographed and authorized. A ‘Principals Meeting’ of the National Security Council is the highest level meeting in the U.S. Government. They are chaired by the National Security Adviser (in this case, Condoleeza Rice, but in prior administrations people like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Anthony Lake, and Sandy Berger). Other attendees usually include the vice-president, the secretaries of State and Defense, the Attorney General, and the CIA Director.
The ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that were approved involved torture including, but by no means limited to, Water Torture (waterboarding). Mistreatment of prisoners quickly spread beyond the narrow scope of these original meetings (as you can see here).
It is an unprecedented development for the President of the United States to admit authorizing the torture of human beings held at the mercy of the U.S. Government. Even more startling has been the refusal of most media outlets to cover this admission. But the silence has not been total. Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post has written about this news and about the way the media (both local and national) has covered it. And I want you to send a link to his article to everyone you know so that it can go as viral as we can make it go.
Froomkin details the president’s admission and his casual dismissal of the moral and national security complications of his action.
Bush: “…And, yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved. I don’t know what’s new about that; I’m not so sure what’s so startling about that.”
To be clear, the president is telling us that he approved of torturing human beings (although he calls it something else) and that he can’t figure out what is so startling about it because it’s old news. Except, it isn’t old news at all. It’s brand-spanking new news not only that he approved it, but that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, and other high ranking officials got down into precise details about how the torture was going to be implemented on a case by case basis.
I want you to send this link to your whole mailbox because it’s one of the few mainstream media outlets to cover the facts of this case rather than ignore them. And we have to do something about it.
My friend Will Bunch of the Philly Daily News had the privilege to ask Barack Obama about these revelations in an interview tonight.
The question was inspired by a recent report by ABC News, confirmed by the Associated Press, that high-level officials including Vice President Dick Cheney and former Cabinet secretaries Colin Powell, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld, among others, met in the White House and discussed the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques on terrorism suspects.
I mentioned the report in my question, and said “I know you’ve talked about reconciliation and moving on, but there’s also the issue of justice, and a lot of people — certainly around the world and certainly within this country — feel that crimes were possibly committed” regarding torture, rendition, and illegal wiretapping. I wanted to know how whether his Justice Department “would aggressively go after and investigate whether crimes have been committed.”
Here’s his answer, in its entirety:
What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that because we don’t have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.
So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment — I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General — having pursued, having looked at what’s out there right now — are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it’s important– one of the things we’ve got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing between really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I’ve said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law — and I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.”
That’s a prudential answer to Will Bunch’s question. But the answer to Obama’s question about ‘distinguishing between really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity’ is that a conspiracy to commit torture is unambiguously in the latter category. What is needed is for the public to get this information. That is why I want you to send everyone the link because people are not getting this information. Most media outlets and most congresspersons are far too gutless or uncomfortable to even contemplate the moral stain this represents for our country. Our entire national security establishment engaged in an criminal conspiracy to deny human beings their human rights and subject them to inhumane and criminal mistreatment.
People can make up their own mind if there were mitigating circumstances, but not until they have the information that this happened at all.