Among the many ironies is that most of these prisoners were kept, if for any reason at all, in order “to sweat them” for what they knew, when everyone who knew torture knew it generated unreliable data.

Listening to pundits and Villagers bemoan the injustice and perversion of investigating the Bush regime’s excesses is like listening to the Catholic Church explain how damaging it would be to it, if it were forced to disclose the sexual predation of its priests and how its leadership put them in charge of flock after flock of sheep.

If democracy is that frail, then that’s not really what we’ve built our government on.

The sad, disheartening part of this line of legal reasoning is that you cannot permit someone to go scott-free simply because they have been tortured in the past. To do so would be a license to claim to have been tortured so as to avoid culpability.

Just another reason why I hate Busholini and his ilk for making us go through the affective and legal turmoil of their stupid, sociopathic need to torture people. It isn’t pretty. And, frankly, it makes me hate them even more…I sure hope it doesn’t make them smirk…because, if it does, I’d want to see them clocked up in Bagram for a time commiserate with their own culpability for the legal travesty that they’ve visited on the United States.

Yeah, I didn’t like the fear that 9-11 brought to our shores…but I think that to have let the logic behind it, that terrorizing your enemies somehow solves a problem, especially one as complex as the rise of religious fundamentalism, either here or in the Middle East, eh, is so stupid as to defy rational explanation entirely. Bush-lite and Gauleiter Cheney are just that…light on intellect and strong on being brutal. May they be impeached…and if not, may history impeach ourselves.

Discussion of Miranda in these situations is lame; even I don’t buy that it is applicable, and i am the king of liberal ass whiny defense arguments.

In the working thread on the OIG report, I said this

184/438 FBI agents raised the issue of interrogations where the military (or someone) uses rough stuff, and then the FBI comes in with its rapport building techniques. It looks like a Mutt and Jeff routine, and the agents were concerned that they would be deemed to be participating in illegal interrogations. They were looking for advice as to how long they had to wait for the illegal stuff to wear off. There doesn’t seem to be any answer here either, maybe a “totality of the circumstances test”, and, of course, there is the proble of whether the agent knew what was illegal for a specific agency.

Sure makes FBI redo of the investigations for use in these show trials look unlikely.

The answer to the question is in my comment at 124:

187/438. How long between the time when the detainee is subjected to “severe physical conditions” and the time when the FBI can interview them? The “cooling-off period” is 12 hours, according to the FBI Office of General Counsel.

So, the FBI leadership thought that the effects of coercion wear off in 12 hours? I thought this would be a problem, but Judge Allred appears to think that there is some time frame in which coercion can wear off.

I quote this from the opinion on the legal standard for admissibility in cases where coercion is alleged:

Statements made where the “degree of coercion inherent in the production of a statement offered by either party is disputed, such statement may only be admitted” if the military judge determines, after a hearing, that (1) the totality of the circumstances renders the statement reliable and possessing sufficient probative value; and (2) the interests of justice would be best served by admission of the statement into evidence. 10 U.S.C. § 948r(c), (d); MCRE 304(c).

Note that this is transcribed, since the document isn’t searchable.

Defense counsel asserted that the statements were coerced, and Judge deals with this argument in his discussion of the admissibility of each statement. He apparently is saying that whatever coercive effect there may have been was insufficient to prevent use of the statements under the applicable rule.