Congress Challenges Bush Over CIA Tapes
Dec 19, 4:21 PM (ET) By PAMELA HESS and LARA JAKES JORDAN

WASHINGTON (AP) - In a direct challenge to President Bush, a House panel said Wednesday it has prepared subpoenas to force CIA officials to testify about the agency's secret destruction of interrogation videotapes.

The Justice Department had blocked the officials from appearing at a closed hearing before the panel this week, citing the department's ongoing investigation into the destruction of videotapes of the harsh interrogation of two al-Qaida suspects in 2002. The CIA destroyed the tapes in 2005.

The House Intelligence Committee's threat marked the second challenge to a White House attempt to shut down independent investigations into the matter, and escalates a fight over which branch of government properly has jurisdiction. On Tuesday, a federal judge rejected an administration effort to keep the courts out of the investigation, and summoned Justice Department lawyers to court on Friday to discuss whether destroying the tapes violated a court order to preserve evidence about detainees...

House Judiciary witness: Destroyed CIA tapes are 'ultimate cover-up'
David Edwards and Jason Rhyne
Published: Thursday December 20, 2007

DOJ representative is no-show at hearing

The CIA's official explanation for destroying at least two videotapes depicting severe interrogation techniques "fails the straight-face test," an expert witness told the House Judiciary Committee Thursday.

In a hearing focused on the Justice Department's role in the tapes' destruction and the legality of torture tactics, George Washington University Law School professor Stephen Saltzburg heavily rebuked CIA reasoning that the decision was made in part to protect the identify of interrogators.

"The rationale for destroying the tapes to protect the identity of the interrogators is almost as embarrassing as the destruction itself," said Saltzburg, who is also general counsel for the National Institute of Military Justice. He said that the tapes could easily have been modified to obscure the faces of those involved, and that regardless, the CIA keeps a written record of which officers interrogated detainees.

"And so the explanation for destruction fails the straight-face test," he said. "The only plausible explanation, I believe, is that the CIA wanted to assure that those tapes would never be seen by any judicial tribunal -- not even a military commission -- and they would never be seen by a committee of Congress."..

We don't need "Torturer General Part Deux", shame on these two for their capitulation on torture...

Justice Nominee Gets 2 Key Votes From Democrats
By PHILIP SHENON and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN November 3, 2007
WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 — The confirmation of Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general appeared to be all but certain on Friday after two key Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee announced they would support the nomination despite complaints over Mr. Mukasey’s refusal to clarify his views on what amounts to torture.

The announcements by the senators, Dianne Feinstein of California and Charles E. Schumer of New York, came after Mr. Schumer met with the nominee on Friday afternoon and said he had obtained Mr. Mukasey’s promise to enforce laws that banned any of the harsh interrogation methods known to have been used on Qaeda terrorists after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks...

How special, the CrippledChimp bans torture and inhumane and degrading treatment. The catch? Bush can "interpret the meaning and application" of international standards for prisoner treatment, a provision intended to allow him to authorize aggressive interrogation methods that might otherwise be seen as illegal by international courts."

Bush bars cruel, inhumane interrogation of terror suspects By DEB RIECHMANN July 20, 2007
WASHINGTON — President Bush signed an executive order today prohibiting cruel and inhumane treatment -- including humiliation or denigration of religious beliefs -- in the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects.

The White House declined to say whether the CIA currently has a detention and interrogation program, but said if it did, it must adhere to the guidelines outlined in the executive order. The order targets captured al-Qaida terrorists who have information on attack plans or the whereabouts of the group's senior leaders...

CIA Dissenters Aided Secret Prisons Report: Author Tuesday 17 July 2007
Brussels - Dissident U.S. intelligence officers angry at former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helped a European probe uncover details of secret CIA prisons in Europe, the top investigator said on Tuesday.

Swiss Senator Dick Marty, author of a Council of Europe report on the jails, said senior CIA officials disapproved of Rumsfeld's methods in hunting down terrorist suspects, and had agreed to talk to him on condition of anonymity.

"There were huge conflicts between the CIA and Rumsfeld. Many leading figures in the CIA did not accept these methods at all," Marty told European Parliament committees, defending his work against complaints it was based on unnamed sources...

It Can Happen Here By Marie Cocco
Posted on Jun 12, 2007
WASHINGTON—There was a time when the dark, political drama was my preferred weekend movie. That was before kids and suburbs and serial viewings of “Shrek.”

The films were almost always about some exotic country gripped in a vise of poverty and dictatorship, where human life is cheap and strongmen unaccountable for crimes that shock the conscience. The genre was popularized in the 1982 film “Missing,” by the master director Costa-Gavras. It was a fictionalized account of the kidnapping and murder of a young American journalist in Chile, and the political awakening that his conservative father and the journalist ‘s wife undergo when they come to understand that the American government refuses to aide their search and somehow appears complicit in the horrors they see unfolding around them.

No matter where these dramas were set—in Latin America or in Africa or the Soviet Union or Northern Ireland—you would leave the theater stunned and silent, for a time. But safe, it seemed, in the knowledge that it could not happen here. Now it has...