Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

GOP Promises, "there will be war" if Obama Releases Bush Torture Memos

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • GOP Promises, "there will be war" if Obama Releases Bush Torture Memos

    Republicans in Desperation Over Obama Releasing More Bush Torture Memos
    By Scott Horton, The Daily Beast
    Posted on April 9, 2009, Printed on April 9, 2009


    Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to “go nuclear” over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration’s abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration’s darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.

    Barack Obama entered Washington with a promise of transparency. One of his first acts was a presidential directive requiring that the Freedom of Information Act, a near dead letter during the Bush years, was to be enforced according to its terms. He specifically criticized the Bush administration’s practice of preparing secret memos that determined legal policy and promised to review and publish them after taking office.

    But in the past week, questions about Obama’s commitment to transparency have mounted. On April 2, the Justice Department was expected to make public a set of four memoranda prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel, long sought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy organizations in a pending FOIA litigation. The memos, authored by then-administration officials and now University of California law professor John Yoo, federal appellate judge Jay Bybee and former Justice Department lawyer Stephen Bradbury, apparently grant authority for the brutal treatment of prisoners, including waterboarding, isolated confinement in coffin-like containers, and “head smacking.” The stakes over release of the papers are increasingly high. Yoo and Bybee are both targets of a criminal investigation in a Spanish court probing the torture of five Spanish citizens formerly held in Guantánamo; also named in the Spanish case are former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and three other Bush lawyers. Legal observers in Spain consider the Bush administration lawyers at serious risk of indictment, and the memos, once released, could be entered as evidence in connection with their prosecution. Unlike the torture memos that are already public, these memos directly approve specific torture techniques and therefore present a far graver problem for their authors.

    The release of the memos that the Senate Republicans want to suppress was cleared by Attorney General Eric Holder and White House counsel Greg Craig, and then was stopped when “all hell broke loose” inside the Obama administration, according to an article by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff. Newsweek attributes internal opposition to disclosure of the Bush-era torture memos to White House counterterrorism adviser and former CIA official John O. Brennan, who has raised arguments that exposure of the memoranda would run afoul of policies protecting the secrecy of agency techniques and has also argued that the memos would embarrass nations like Morocco, Jordan, Pakistan, Tunisia and Egypt, which have cooperated closely with the CIA in its extraordinary renditions program. Few informed independent observers, however, find much to credit in the Brennan objections because the techniques are now well-known, as is the role of the cooperating foreign intelligence services—any references to which would in any event likely be redacted before the memoranda are released. Moreover, the argument that the confidence of those engaged in torture—serious criminal conduct under international and domestic law—should be kept because they would be “embarrassed” if it were to come out borders on comic.

    The Justice Department source confirms to me that Brennan has consistently opposed making public the torture memos—and any other details about the operations of the extraordinary renditions program—but this source suggests that concern about the G.O.P.’s roadblock in the confirmation process is the principle reason that the memos were not released. Republican senators have expressed strong reservations about their promised exposure, expressing alarm that a critique of the memos by Justice’s ethics office (Office of Professional Responsibility) will also be released. “There was no ‘direct’ threat,” said the source, “but the message was communicated clearly—if the OLC and OPR memoranda are released to the public, there will be war.” This is understood as a threat to filibuster the nominations of Johnsen and Koh. Not only are they among the most prominent academic critics of the torture memoranda, but are also viewed as the strongest advocates for release of the torture memos on Obama’s legal policy team.

    A Republican Senate staffer further has confirmed to me that the Johnsen nomination was discussed at the last G.O.P. caucus meeting. Not a single Republican indicated an intention to vote for Dawn Johnsen, while Senator John Cornyn of Texas was described as “gunning for her,” specifically noting publication of the torture memos.

    No decision was taken at that Republican caucus meeting whether to filibuster or not, though Cornyn was generally believed to support filibustering Johnsen and potentially other nominees. Johnsen has met recently with moderate Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, both of whom are being lobbied heavily by colleagues and religious right groups to oppose her nomination.

    Both Koh and Johnsen are targets of sustained attacks coming from right-wing lobbying groups. The Daily Beast previously reviewed the attacks on Johnsen, while Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick has catalogued the recent attacks on Koh. Former Bush administration Solicitor General Ted Olson recently endorsed the Koh nomination, calling the Yale dean “a man of great integrity.” But connecting the Obama nominations to the Bush torture memos escalates the conflict toward a thermonuclear level.

    Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national-security affairs for Harper's magazine and The American Lawyer, among other publications.
    © 2009 The Daily Beast All rights reserved.
    View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/135582/
    Christianity: The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree...

  • #2
    When did they torture Bush?
    Blah

    Comment


    • #3
      So far, the Obama DOJ's record on this is unimpressive. I hope they release the memos without further delay. Let the Republicans scream all they want. I rather suspect they have good reason to fear those memos. **** them.

      -Arrian
      grog want tank...Grog Want Tank... GROG WANT TANK!

      The trick isn't to break some eggs to make an omelette, it's convincing the eggs to break themselves in order to aspire to omelettehood.

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by chequita guevara View Post
        "there will be war"

        Ooh, god forbid politicians in Washington take on an adversarial attitude and decide policy along primarily partisan lines. Unheard of!

        Seriously, quit it with the sensationalist titles for such mundane, predictable posturing as this.
        Unbelievable!

        Comment


        • #5
          It was a quote from the article.
          Captain of Team Apolyton - ISDG 2012

          When I was younger I thought curfews were silly, but now as the daughter of a young woman, I appreciate them. - Rah

          Comment


          • #6
            A war on torture could actually be something good
            Blah

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by BeBro View Post
              When did they torture Bush?
              Not soon enough.

              Comment


              • #8
                Unless they provide evidence in support of a crime, releasing classified documents is bad policy, especially for a publicity stunt such as this, since it will only undermine government transparency in the long run.
                We need seperate human-only games for MP/PBEM that dont include the over-simplifications required to have a good AI
                If any man be thirsty, let him come unto me and drink. Vampire 7:37
                Just one old soldiers opinion. E Tenebris Lux. Pax quaeritur bello.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by SpencerH View Post
                  Unless they provide evidence in support of a crime, releasing classified documents is bad policy, especially for a publicity stunt such as this, since it will only undermine government transparency in the long run.
                  Technically, it wouldn't be releasing classifying documents. It would be declassifying documents, and then releasing them.

                  And because torture is a crime, and because these memos were written to "justify" this crime, they are most probably evidence of the crime.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by Zkribbler View Post
                    Technically, it wouldn't be releasing classifying documents. It would be declassifying documents, and then releasing them.

                    And because torture is a crime, and because these memos were written to "justify" this crime, they are most probably evidence of the crime.
                    Heh...in other words, the right doesn't want to let the light of day shine on the stuff of their wet dreams.

                    Nice.

                    -=Vel=-
                    The list of published books grows. If you're curious to see what sort of stories I weave out, head to Amazon.com and do an author search for "Christopher Hartpence." Help support Candle'Bre, a game created by gamers FOR gamers. All proceeds from my published works go directly to the project.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Wow. Imagine how much progress we'd make if these guys were gone.
                      “As a lifelong member of the Columbia Business School community, I adhere to the principles of truth, integrity, and respect. I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.”
                      "Capitalism ho!"

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Aren't the repubs trying to block most Obama nominations anyway? I say release them and throw in free one-way tickets to Spain for the indicted.
                        I'm consitently stupid- Japher
                        I think that opinion in the United States is decidedly different from the rest of the world because we have a free press -- by free, I mean a virgorously presented right wing point of view on the air and available to all.- Ned

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Is there a real article on this?
                          I make no bones about my moral support for [terrorist] organizations. - chegitz guevara
                          For those who aspire to live in a high cost, high tax, big government place, our nation and the world offers plenty of options. Vermont, Canada and Venezuela all offer you the opportunity to live in the socialist, big government paradise you long for. –Senator Rubio

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Why don't you use your netitude and find some?
                            “As a lifelong member of the Columbia Business School community, I adhere to the principles of truth, integrity, and respect. I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.”
                            "Capitalism ho!"

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              He should do it. Everyone should know exactly what the Republicans have been supporting for the last 8 years. They've claimed it wasn't torture, well, now we all get to see exactly what their not torture was.
                              Try http://wordforge.net/index.php for discussion and debate.

                              Comment

                              Working...
                              X