Gonzales Secretly Authorized CIA Torture

Posted by Oliver Willis at 5:00 AM on October 4, 2007.

This post, written by Oliver Willis, originally appeared on Like Kryptonite to Stupid

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Your government, on Conservative Republicans.

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.

It's too bad the Republican-run congress and the mainstream media fiddled while these scoundrels used the constitution as toilet paper, but bit by bit, element by element we're going to find out the true story of the government under George W. Bush. The most corrupt and morally bankrupt government in U.S. history. Direct from hell, Richard Nixon has got to be looking on with a broad grin and an "attaboy!"

Oliver Willis is the blogmaster at Like Kryptonite To Stupid