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In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.
Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration's counterterrorism effort. The CIA last week admitted that videotape of an interrogation of one of the waterboarded detainees was destroyed in 2005 against the advice of Justice Department and White House officials, provoking allegations that its actions were illegal and the destruction was a coverup.
Yet long before "waterboarding" entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.
With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).
Individual lawmakers' recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/02/ha-ha-funny-torture-jokes.html
The Center for American Progress has just launched an advertising campaign called "Torture is not US." The hard truth is that for at least five decades it has been. But it doesn't have to be.
NOTE: Arthur Sibler also wrote:
The leading Democratic presidential contenders have said they reject torture as an official instrument of government policy. In the context of the actions of the Democratic Congress, such claims are contemptibly meaningless:
By 'excluding' the public from 'news' about Dennis Kucinich's IMPEACHMENT proceedings, by 'blocking' the flow of information about THAT FACT, what is Aurthur Sibler guilty of promoting?
By 'excluding' the public from 'news' about Dennis Kucinich's IMPEACHMENT proceedings, by 'blocking' the flow of information about THAT FACT, what is Aurthur Sibler guilty of promoting?
This is a very important question.
Why ‘play politics’ when the end of the human species is at stake? If a person or a group of people are suspected (actually confess) of torture and mass murder, then, is it ‘RIGHT’ to discredit (by ignoring it) the exercise of POWER aimed toward accurately accounting for the actual people ordering and managing the torture and mass murder?
This is my same question to any ‘republican’ (Ron Paul for example) who has FAILED to support the POWER TO IMPEACH:
TORTURING MASS MURDERERS
Edit to add:
WHILE THEY ARE TORTURNING AND MASS MURDERING
OK, soooooo, if you were on the rack and if YOU were watching as all your loved ones were being murdered slowly, then, would you SUPPORT IMPEACHMENT?
?
Last edited on Mon Dec 10th, 2007 11:46 am by Joe Kelley