Torture report confirms team Bush war crimes

"I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward, as opposed to looking backward . . . At the CIA, you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders, lawyering up . . . "

Now we know that many of those people at the CIA were using their extraordinary talents to devise new and more horrific ways to torture, humiliate, degrade and mistreat the people under their control.

To his credit, shortly after he was inaugurated, Obama signed an executive order banning torture. But hunger strikers at Guantánamo are still force-fed, a practice that violates the Torture Convention, according to the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT).

In 2009, US Attorney General Eric Holder ordered an investigation headed by veteran prosecutor Assistant US Attorney John Durham. But, two years later, Holder announced that his office would investigate only the deaths of Gul Rahman and Manadel al-Jamadi, who died while in CIA custody. Holder said that the US Department of Justice had "determined that an expanded criminal investigation of the remaining matters is not warranted." With that decision, Holder made clear that no one would be held accountable for the torture and abuse except possibly for the deaths of Rahman and al-Jamadi.



Ultimately, the Obama administration gave a free pass to those responsible for the two deaths. Rahman froze to death in 2002, after being stripped and shackled to a cold cement floor in the secret Afghan prison known as the Salt Pit. Al-Jamadi died after he was suspended from the ceiling by his wrists, which were bound behind his back. Military police officer Tony Diaz, who was present during al-Jamadi's torture, said that blood gushed from his mouth like "a faucet had turned on" when he was lowered to the ground. A military autopsy determined that al-Jamadi's death was a homicide.

Nevertheless, Holder said that "based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths, the department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt."



Torture is Who They Are

After the report was made public, the White House issued a statement calling the CIA interrogation program "harsh" and the treatment "troubling" - a study in understatement. Obama said that torture "is contrary to who we are."

But torture is who President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are. Under the well-established doctrine of command responsibility, commanders are liable for war crimes if they knew, or should have known, their subordinates would commit them and they did nothing to stop or prevent it.

In 2008, ABC News reported that the National Security Council Principals Committee consisting of Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Tenet and Ashcroft met in the White House and micromanaged the torture of terrorism suspects by approving specific torture techniques such as waterboarding. Bush admitted in his 2010 memoir that he authorized waterboarding. Cheney, Rice and Yoo have made similar admissions.

Indeed, Cheney recently admitted on Fox News that Bush "was in fact an integral part of the interrogation program, and he had to approve it." Cheney added, "We did discuss the techniques. There was no effort on our part to keep him from that." Karl Rove told Fox News that Bush was "intimately involved in the decision" to use the EIT. Rove said Bush "was presented, I believe, 12 techniques, he authorized the use of 10 of them, including waterboarding."

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice should be should be prosecuted for their crimes.