Republicans represent torture, lawlessness, secrecy , lies

The New York Times presented a lengthy article on the way the Bush administration and the Department of Justice under Alberto Gonzalez implemented the harshest "interrogation" techniques possible. Then, when Congress tried to stop them, the administration secretly declared that the torture techniques did not violate the law passed by Congress.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

The excuse for the secrecy was so that that America's enemies couldn't train to beat the torture techniques, but the real reason was so that the American public would not know how utterly depraved the Bush administration and the Republican Party had become.

This was no accident or action by an out-of-control underling. The secret declaration that the torture techniques would be used in spite of the law passed by Congress was one of Bush's signing statements.

It's not as though there wasn't a problem in determining what should or could be done to interrogate prisoners. Here is what the CIA was doing:

slaps to the head; hours held naked in a frigid cell; days and nights without sleep while battered by thundering rock music; long periods manacled in stress positions; or the ultimate, waterboarding.

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics. While President Bush and C.I.A. officials would later insist that the harsh measures produced crucial intelligence, many veteran interrogators, psychologists and other experts say that less coercive methods are equally or more effective.

With virtually no experience in interrogations, the C.I.A. had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture. The agency officers questioning prisoners constantly sought advice from lawyers thousands of miles away.

“We were getting asked about combinations — ‘Can we do this and this at the same time?’” recalled Paul C. Kelbaugh, a veteran intelligence lawyer who was deputy legal counsel at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center from 2001 to 2003.

Interrogators were worried that even approved techniques had such a painful, multiplying effect when combined that they might cross the legal line, Mr. Kelbaugh said. He recalled agency officers asking: “These approved techniques, say, withholding food, and 50-degree temperature — can they be combined?” Or “Do I have to do the less extreme before the more extreme?”

There was a problem that needed to be resolved in what could be done, but to do it in secret the way the Bush administration did it is an overt admission that the people of the Bush administration knew they were being too extreme and did not want the public to know what they were authorizing.

Let's say that again. President Bush explicitly and in secret declared that the use of torture would be the policy of the American government! He took this action in secret even as he told the American public that he had disavowed the use of torture by the U.S. government. The Republicans in Congress support this, and in the Senate they are doing everything they can to prevent Congressional oversight.

One thing to keep in mind. The Bush administration and the Republican Party took made these torture decisions in secret and hidden behind lies for fear of how the American public would react. That means that the decision to conduct these torture techniques, much like the peremptory invasion of Iraq based on lies, is the responsibility of the Republican Party. When actions are taken by criminals without the knowledge of the American public, it is not conducted by America. It is conducted by those lying Republicans and they are wholly responsible for such decisions and actions.

Bush and the Republican Party represent a cancer on the body politic of America. They are criminals, not politicians. They must at a minimum be removed from government.