I Could Have Stopped Waterboarding Before It Happened

[DonViejo]

An exclusive account from the CIA’s former top lawyer.

By JOHN RIZZO
January 05, 2014

:::snip:::

About a week later, a couple of our lawyers (our contingent at the CTC (Counter terrorism Center) had tripled from three to nine since 9/11) came to my office. They told me about a different approach the CTC had just devised to deal with Zubaydah. It had a deceptively bland name: “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” and from the start they were called EITs for short. During my previous 25 years as an Agency lawyer, I had never heard of anything remotely like this.

Evidently aware of the distinct possibility that what they were proposing would scare the hell out of me, the CTC contingent prefaced their presentation with a number of assurances: The EITs they were proposing to employ on Zubaydah were not techniques the CTC had just dreamed up; with a couple of exceptions, the U.S. military had used them for years in training exercises (called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) on thousands of soldiers to prepare them in case they were captured and subjected to such methods by the enemy. Further, CTC analysts, psychologists and a couple of outside consultants had carefully culled only those EITs from the SERE menu that they believed best suited, and most likely, to break Zubaydah’s resistance. Finally, the EITs would be judiciously applied, beginning with the ones that were least coercive, for a limited period of time, and would end as soon as Zubaydah demonstrated that he was no longer resisting and was ready to cooperate. They had no intention of employing EITs any longer or any more harshly than was absolutely necessary. While I don’t remember them saying it exactly, their message was implicit: We want no part of torture.

“OK,” I said, bracing myself. “Describe everything you’d like to do. In the order you’d do them. In detail, and take your time.”

And so they began. The following is my best recollection of the way the CTC guys described their proposed techniques to me. Later, there would come written documents, describing them in more detail (some techniques would be added and some would be subtracted from this list). But this is what I recall being told at the very beginning, on this day in my office in early April 2002, about the proposed EITs. It’s not easy to forget.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/waterboarding-cia-lawyer-john-rizzo-torture-101758.html#ixzz2pmFLbUqk

[struggle4progress]

1. Rizzo was an a-hole back then and he's still an a-hole today

From his book Company Man, which recently went on sale: I'm a lawyer, and torture is legally defined in U.S. law. If I had concluded — or, more importantly, if the Justice Department had concluded — that these techniques constitute torture, we would never have done them. So I can't say they were torture. I didn't concede it was torture then, and I don't concede that it's torture now.

[Thor_MN]

2. Heard him on NPR. What an ass.

Said that he was concerned that if there was another attack after 9/11, he would have been horribly upset if he had said no to torture. Too stupid to figure out that his job was NOT to be dependent on his personal feelings. If he couldn't handle the pressure he should have resigned. This guy should be serving time for the war crimes he green lighted.

[Solly Mack]

3. POS.

[bananas]

4. k&r nt

[Jefferson23]

5. Fucking jerk. n/t