Bush Aides Linked to Talks on Interrogations(meetings led by Condi Rice)

[maddezmom]

Source: NYT


By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: September 24, 2008
WASHINGTON — Senior White House officials played a central role in deliberations in the spring of 2002 about whether the Central Intelligence Agency could legally use harsh interrogation techniques while questioning an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, according to newly released documents.

In meetings during that period, the officials debated specific interrogation methods that the C.I.A. had proposed to use on Qaeda operatives held at secret C.I.A. prisons overseas, the documents show. The meetings were led by Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, and attended by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top administration officials.

The documents provide new details about the still-murky early months of the C.I.A.’s detention program, when the agency began using a set of harsh interrogation techniques weeks before the Justice Department issued a written legal opinion in August 2002 authorizing their use. Congressional investigators have long tried to determine exactly who authorized these techniques before the legal opinion was completed.

The documents are a list of answers provided by Ms. Rice and John B. Bellinger III, the former top lawyer at the National Security Council, to detailed questions by the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is investigating the abuse of detainees in American custody. The documents were provided to The New York Times by Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the committee.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/25/washington/25detain.html?ref=world

[debbierlus]

1. They are putting out so many important stories all at once while America is terrorized by financial

Blackmail by their government.

I am outraged.

[Nambe]

2. Rice admits Bush officials held White House talks on CIA interrogations

Source: Los Angeles Times

Senior Bush administration officials held a series of meetings in the White House in 2002 and 2003 to discuss allowing the CIA to use harsh interrogation methods on Al Qaeda detainees, according to a written statement Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently provided to Senate investigators.

Rice's written response to investigators on the Senate Armed Services Committee marks the first time a high-ranking White House official has formally acknowledged the White House discussions, which led to the CIA's use of waterboarding and other coercive methods.

In particular, Rice wrote in the Sept. 12 statement that officials discussed simulated torture techniques that elite U.S. soldiers were subjected to as part of a survival training program, and that she and other officials were told that such methods "had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm." ...

..."We've long believed they took place," Levin said in an interview, referring to the high-level meetings that Rice described. Her responses, however, provide what he described as "new, concrete evidence that they took place in the White House." ...

Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-interrogate25-2008sep25,0,7213775.story

[SpiralHawk]

3. "Kiss my badass boots. Sneer." - Condi (R - of course)

[Solly Mack]

4. Too bad stripes aren't in

Course, we already knew that from the principals committee

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

5. Funny how she failed to mention this at the Senate hearings.