By William Fisher
NEW YORK, May 7 (IPS) - As human rights groups demanded the release of a report on a long-running investigation of the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the unlawful interrogations of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, new torture claims were leveled at two U.S. military contractors [...]
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, masters of evil John Yoo and David Addington pop back up, like Jason or a platter of undercooked pork, to tell the U.S. Congress how much they’d really like to take that water and pour it over your blindfolded and Saran-wrapped face.
Happy Birthday, U.S.A.!
On Jan. 17, 2003, Mary Walker, the Air Force general counsel, received an urgent memo from the Pentagon’s top attorney. Attached to the classified document was a set of directives drafted two days earlier by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Detainee number 063, Mohamed Al-Kahtani, was one of the many hundreds housed in the Guantanamo (known as “Gitmo”) Bay detention camps who was subjected to 20 hours of interrogation on only four hours of sleep.
Yesterday another of the long-withheld torture memoranda was released. In early 2003, beginning after the Ashcroft Justice Department dispensed advice to the Central Intelligence Agency authorizing the introduction of torture techniques, Rumsfeld’s lawyer, William J. (“Jim”) Haynes II–now the general counsel of Chevron–was prodding OLC for a memorandum to help him in a battle with lawyers at the Pentagon. On March 14, 2003, John Yoo issued an 81-page memorandum of law to Haynes (I’ll call it “Yoo Two”).
By Andy Worthington
The latest diclosures further erode claims by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that prisoner abuses at Gardez – or the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib – were isolated acts by a few ‘bad apples’, says Jason Leopold. John Yoo and some other Bush administration lawyers who [...]
John Yoo’s legal opinions and questions about culpability and timing.
By Scott Horton
John C. Yoo likes the limelight, but it’s causing him some grief. Of the half a dozen lawyers who played important roles in a Bush administration decision to legalize the use of highly coercive interrogation techniques, only Yoo has emerged as the public face [...]
By PAUL C. CAMPOS, Scripps Howard News Service
In 2003, when he was a deputy assistant U. S. attorney general, John Yoo wrote a long legal memorandum arguing that the president has the inherent constitutional authority to torture people.
Furthermore, Yoo claimed, the president’s power to torture can’t be limited by Congress, the courts, or international treaties. [...]
Nick Juliano
This week’s revelation of another secret Bush administration memo that seemed to eliminate
any boundaries on the treatment of detainees added to the already substantial evidence that US military and intelligence interrogators have abused and perhaps even tortured prisoners rounded up during the “war on terror.”
Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo wrote in 2003 [...]
Guantanamo Bay News
