First, congratulations on your front-page recognition in the Times; such recognition is late in coming and is more than well deserved.

Second, here is something that is really bugging me, and perhaps you as well. According to the Times, “The sentences in the memo containing that information appear to have been redacted from some copies but are visible in others.”

If that is true — and I have to go back to the memos but haven’t had the time — isn’t it time to raise some serious questions about the redactions? I can see absolutely no legitimate reason that the information regarding the number of times these people were waterboarded should be withheld. To be sure, there were not many redactions and some of them definitely appear to be designed to remove the names of particular persons involved in the interrogations, but not all are. for instance, the substantial one-or-more-sentence-long redaction at the end of the last full paragraph on p. 3 of the Aug. 1, 2002 memo (the infamous “insect” paragraph) is particularly mysterious. My hunch is that this redaction — like the redaction of the number of times that Mohammed and Zubaydah were waterboarded — is motivated by fear of embarrassment and/or the revelation of information clearly pointing to culpability. (As you have noted, the extent of the waterboarding exceeded even the OLC’s Room 101 guidelines.)

http://wineandexcrement.com/se…..ials/1270/

WASHINGTON – Responding to Justice Department memos declassified by the Obama administration last week, former Bush administration officials claim that CIA agents who repeatedly waterboarded Sept. 11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were not bent on torture but simply treating a raging case of head lice and dandruff …

you can go in there and count it up for yourself. lots of reading to get there.

and what’s the difference between 10 times and 183 times?
absolutely none. you’re kind of missing the point of that whole argument really. “but i didn’t steal a dozen cookies i only stole 4!!!” it’s still wrong. and they lied about it. now they are caught in the lies they told about their illegal treatment by use of torture to prisoners and family members of those prisoners. everything you said emphasizes that. go look it up in the official memos.

Flat out awesome.

Thanks for blogging.

couldn’t figure out how if they stayed within guidelines how they could justify the numbers even if they had ‘permission’ to waterboard. either way, they broke the law.

your last two paragraphs are the gist of it—

Even assuming two “approval periods” overlapped in a Calendar month they would only be allowed 120 total applications.

So it looks as if someone may have approved an additional “approval period” within that Calendar month…or allowed an escalation of actual number of “applications”. Clearly though…someone is working off a yet unseen memo/order OR there is activity that isn’t “strictly to order” going on.

my emphasis.

“Moreover, you [the CIA] have also orally informed us that although some of these techniques may be used with more than once [sic], that repetition will not be substantial because the techniques generally lose their effectiveness after several repetitions.”

Yet according to the May 30, 2005, memo at Page 37,

“The CIA used the waterboard ‘at least 83 times during August 2002,’ in the interrogation of Zubaydah, IG Report at 90 . . . .”

So at the same time the CIA “orally informed” DOJ that the use of these “techniques” would “not be substantial,” it was using one of them an average of nearly three times a day for 30 days on one person. Since almost the entire August 2, 2002, memo is based on information provided by the CIA, there’s no reason to believe any of the other “facts” on which the tortuous argument for torture was based.

Moreover, if the CIA had concluded before August 2, 2002, that “the techniques generally lose their effectiveness after several repetitions,” why carry on? Perhaps, in fact, the “techniques” became ever more “effective” — for those carrying them out.

Hard to add anything that hasn’t already been said. Not only were the Bush Administration sadists, they were incompetent, too. Arrogance can do that, I suppose. They sure were good at making messes, though. Not only did they mess up our foreign policy, they ruined countless lives for little or no benefit.