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CIA [Torture] Tactics Endorsed In Secret [White House] Memos
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by Erik Larson | October 15, 2008 at 04:19 pm
189 views | 6 Recommendations | 4 comments
Recently released previously classified memos make it even clearer that the approval of torture came from the White House.
The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.
The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency's interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.
The memos were the first -- and, for years, the only -- tangible expressions of the administration's consent for the CIA's use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for "policy approval."
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (4)
at 16:31 on October 15th, 2008
Erik Larson, I like this story. It's good stuff.
We all knew torture was being done and all we got was lies about it from Bush.
at 17:20 on October 15th, 2008
yeah, just how thin does "plausible deniability" stretch?
Hold hearings, impeach, prosecute, imprison
at 05:42 on October 16th, 2008
Erik Larson, I like this story. It's good stuff.
Really they want the money back that they bribed the Taliban with in getting the Oil pipeline through Afghanistan and to silence and destroy records and computers that connect them to binLadins CIA connection.. America has given :
In May 2001, US narcotics experts visited Taliban-controlled Afghanistan for the first time. They found the Taliban had followed through on Mullah Omar’s edict outlawing opium-poppy cultivation. In 2000, Afghanistan produced 75% of the world’s opium crop. The Taliban, which since coming to power had used the money from the opium to purchase weapons, had apparently stopped the poppy crop-all in less than a year and with the help of their harsh punishments for farmers found in violation of the ban. The Bush administration found this so satisfying that they immediately pledged an additional $43 million worth of aid to Afghanistan. Yet they used this also as a pretext to bomb the Taliban for their tactics against farmers.
As the State Department reported on October 15, 2001:
Another big reason why they use torture is because of the following: They just can not get information in the regions where Alqaeda and Taliban operate... see this
at 19:18 on October 18th, 2008
Erik Larson, I like this story. It's good stuff.