This entry was posted on
Thursday, January 6th, 2005 at
1:59 pm and is filed
under George W. Bush, Humanity, It’s War! It’s Legal! It’s Lovely!, The War on Stupid.
OK, it’s shocking, it’s alarming…. but it Does. Not. Surprise. Me. At. All.
Guardian – Bush’s choice for top law job faces grilling on torture: Alberto Gonzales, currently his chief legal adviser, told Mr Bush in early 2002 that the White House was not bound by the Geneva conventions in dealing with al-Qaida and the Taliban. In August that year he helped orchestrate and approve a justice department memorandum arguing that interrogators could use techniques which the Red Cross has since described as “tantamount to torture”. His role will come under close scrutiny, but he is expected to survive. Republicans consolidated their hold on the Senate in November and some Democrats are uneasy about blocking the country’s first Hispanic attorney general.
Just let the powerlessness/gutlessness of the Democrats sink in for a bit before continuing…
New York Times – Newly Released Reports Show Early Concern on Prison Abuse: When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last spring, officials characterized the abuse as the aberrant acts of a small group of low-ranking reservists, limited to a few weeks in late 2003. But thousands of pages in military reports and documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to the American Civil Liberties Union in the past few months have demonstrated that the abuse involved multiple service branches in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba, beginning in 2002 and continuing after Congress and the military had begun investigating Abu Ghraib.
ACLU – New Documents Suggest Government Reluctance to Investigate Guantanamo Abuses: Documents released today by the American Civil Liberties Union show that an FBI investigation into the use of “aggressive” interrogation techniques at Guantanamo was sharply scaled back, and that records related to the FBI’s investigation are still being withheld.
You can browse through and read those documents here:
Records Released in Response to Torture FOIA Request
DailyKos – What Bush Lackey Gonzales Wrought: Does it matter that Alberto Gonzales advised the President of the United States that he was not bound by the Geneva Conventions, any international treaties to which the U.S. was a signatory, or federal law when it came to “coercive interrogation” techniques? Of course it does. Here’s why…
Lots and lots of comments and extra info in that last link – do follow and dig. Oh and make time to share Something Funny Happened On The Way To Abu Ghraib.
