Hope someone ask about Addingtons 3-5 trips to Gitmo.

Were outside contractors involved with the “enhanced techniques?

Just what branch of government does Senator Levin believe the Vice President operates out of? Has he ever heard of the “barnacle branch”?

And Doug Feith this morning too.
Feith at 10:00
http://www.c-span.org/

Does he consider prisoners being naked naked?

Pardons would not be favors to criminals. One can argue that officials could have or should have resigned rather than implement questionable legal judgments, but there is no evidence that any high-level official acted with criminal intent. The officials involved appear to have approved only interrogation methods found legal by administration lawyers, and in particular by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). According to long tradition, the OLC is considered a sort of Supreme Court of the executive branch.

There is, of course, a mountain of evidence that the highest officials in the Administration acted with criminal intent. Taylor’s argument is literally a restatement of the “I was just following orders” defense.

By the way, if you dig around on the ICC website, you will see that Moreno-Ocampo has started preliminary investigations of the US for war crimes. The document is a couple of years old and states that there is sufficient evidence that the US has committed war crimes, especially in terms of detainee abuse. One trigger for filing charges that hadn’t been met at that time was that it hadn’t been shown that the abuse was a top-down policy. Obviously, the revelations about the “torture councils” and Bush’s approval of them takes care of that. The other trigger is that they have to allow the US to prosecute first. Ironically, if Taylor got his pardons for everyone involved, that would probably be the final trigger to release Moreno-Ocampo to file charges. I think that would be a huge problem, though, because the pardons just send such a terrible message to the rest of the world about what we are.

As to the West coast time issue, believe me, I fully understand. I have the same issue. Constantly.

As for Ofshe, I’m familiar with some of his work on false memories, but never went too far in reading up on that subject. It has some overlap on the issues I’m investigating, and I found it got me too far afield, and I haven’t been able to find a way to integrate it into my articles. Some of the early workers on government investigation into “brainwashing” later go involved in the cult/deprogrammer/false memories issue. It’s a controversial and important topic.

At the hearings a few weeks ago, Sen. Levin presented a timeline of how torture was implemented at Guantanamo and elsewhere, beginning for requests by Richard Shiffrin, a Deputy General Counsel in the Department of Defense, in July 2002. Yet Shiffrin made requests as early as December 2001, according to Lt. Col. Baumgarten of Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), responsible for the SERE program. This is according to Baumgarten’s own testimony. Yet, inexplicably, this was never followed up by anyone on committee, nor mentioned by Sen. Levin himself in his timeline narrative. And this is despite the fact the SASC has, according to Baumgarten himself, documentary evidence of the earlier solicitation.

But the Dec. 2001 timeline issue is potentially explosive, as it predates approvals Bush got from his OLC re torture of prisoners, exposing Bush and probably plenty of others to war crimes charges, and or impeachment. We must demand the SASC release these documents as part of more relentless and effective investigation, one that leads to the truth, no matter how high up or where it goes.

I humbly suggest that others take me up on this and make sure Levin is asked about the Baumgartner Dec. 2001 solicitation from the administration.

For more, see my article on this, “Media & Gov’t Torture Cover-up: Sen. Levin, Release the 12/01 SERE Docs”