Coming Soon: Declassified Bush-Era Torture Memos - NEWSWEEK

By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball | NEWSWEEK
Published Mar 21, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Mar 30, 2009

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the "enhanced" interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against "high value" Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA. One senior Obama official, who like others interviewed for this story requested anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity, said the memos were "ugly" and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a "truth commission" on torture.

Because of an executive order signed by President Obama on Jan. 22 banning such aggressive tactics, deputies to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. concluded there was no longer any reason to keep the interrogation memos classified. But current and former intel officials pushed back, arguing that any public release might still compromise "sources and methods." According to the administration official, ex-CIA director Michael Hayden was "furious" about the prospect of disclosure and tried to intervene directly with Obama officials. But the White House has sided with Holder. Faced with a court deadline in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit regarding the memos filed by the ACLU, Justice lawyers asked for a two-week extension "because the memoranda are being reviewed for possible release." (White House, Justice and CIA spokesmen all declined to comment.)

The debate about torture ramped up again last week with an account in the New York Review of Books about a secret International Red Cross report that was delivered to the CIA in February 2007. The report, according to journalist Mark Danner, quotes detainees describing, often in gruesome detail, how they were locked in coffin-size boxes; swung by towels around their necks into plywood walls; and forced to stand naked for days while their arms were shackled above their heads.

"I now know we were not fully and completely briefed on the CIA program," Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein told NEWSWEEK. A U.S. official disputed the charge, claiming that members of Congress received more than 30 briefings over the life of the CIA program and that Congressional intel panels had seen the Red Cross report. But the CIA insisted that the report be treated as if it had higher than top-secret classification, precluding any public discussion of its contents. That's why declassification of the memos is significant, administration officials say: it would remove, at long last, the veil of secrecy about how detainees in the war on terror were actually treated.

«Ναι» από Ομπάμα στη δημοσιοποίηση απόρρητων εγγράφων για βασανισμούς - Αντιδρά η CIA - in.gr

Associated Press
23/3/2009
Ουάσινγκτον

Την έγκριση για τη δημοσιοποίηση τριών απόρρητων μνημονίων, όπου περιγράφονται λεπτομερώς οι μέθοδοι βασανισμού υπόπτων για συμμετοχή στην Αλ Κάιντα, επί προεδρίας Μπους, αναμένεται να δώσει ο Μπαράκ Ομπάμα. Η απόφαση έχει προκαλέσει τις έντονες αντιδράσεις της CIA.

Το θέμα αποκάλυψε το περιοδικό Newsweek. Tα έγγραφα συντάχθηκαν το 2005 από δικαστικούς του υπουργείου Δικαιοσύνης, κατά τη θητεία της προηγούμενης κυβέρνησης των ΗΠΑ, και παραθέτουν για πρώτη φορά τις λεπτομέρειες για τις τεχνικές που χρησιμοποιήθηκαν για την ανάκριση κρατουμένων.

Αμερικανός αξιωματούχος δήλωσε στο περιοδικό ότι τα έγγραφα ενδεχομένως είναι επιβαρρυντικά για τη CIA. Αλλοι αξιωματούχοι προβλέπουν ότι μετά τη δημοσιοποίηση των εγγράφων είναι πολύ πιθανό να ζητηθεί η σύσταση ειδική επιτροπής για να διερευνηθούν οι βασανισμοί.

Υπερ της δημοσιοποίσης των εγγράφων έχει ταχθεί και ο Γενικός Εισαγγελέας των ΗΠΑ Έρικ Χόλντερ Τζούνιορ.

Ο Χόλντερ υποστηρίζει ότι δεδομένης της απόφασης Ομπάμα που απαγορεύει τη διενέργεια τέτοιων τακτικών ανάκρισης, δεν υπάρχει λόγος να θεωρούνται απόρρητα έγγραφα.

Εντελώς αντίθετη άποψη εκφράζει, σύμφωνα πάντα με το Newsweek, ο πρώην διευθυντής της CIA Μάικλ Χάιντεν, ο οποίος φέρεται να προσπάθησε να παρεμποδίσει τη δημοσιοποίηση των εγγράφων.

Η κυβέρνηση των ΗΠΑ, ωστόσο, φαίνεται να συντάσσεται με την άποψη του Χόλντερ. Να σημειωθεί ότι την αποκάλυψη του Newsweek αρνήθηκαν να σχολιάσουν επισήμως τόσο ο Λευκός Οίκος και η CIA όσο και το υπουργείο Δικαιοσύνης.

Newsroom ΔΟΛ

Three years in jail for journalist who threw shoe at Bush - THE GUARDIAN

Shoe-thrower Muntazer al-Zaidi. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty

Michael Howard in Irbil and Afif Sarhan in Baghdad
The Guardian, Friday 13 March 2009

Dressed in an old beige suit, with dark rings under his eyes, and a five o'clock shadow, Muntazer al-Zaidi looked more hard-pressed journalist than Arab folk hero as he entered Baghdad's central criminal court yesterday morning to face charges of assaulting a foreign head of state, namely one George W Bush.

The last time the man universally known as "the shoe thrower" appeared in court, three weeks ago, he sported a scarf in the colours of the Iraqi flag and put on a bravura performance, telling of his outrage and uncontrollable emotions when Bush spoke at a news conference on his farewell trip to Iraq. Yesterday, he was mostly subdued. It wasn't until the judge handed down the sentence - three years in a prison - that he burst into life, though his shoes stayed firmly on his feet. "Long live Iraq!" he shouted before being led away by a heavy security detail.

Throughout the brief proceedings Zaidi seemed all too aware that he could face up to 15 years in jail. Standing in the wooden pen, sweating, before a panel of three judges he glanced nervously into the packed observers' gallery, apparently seeking out family and friends.

Kicking off proceedings, the presiding judge Abdulemir Hassan al-Rubaie asked Zaidi whether he was innocent or guilty. "I am innocent," came the reply from the 30-year-old reporter. "What I did was a natural response to the occupation." This electrified the court. Relatives began to protest his innocence and urge the judge to show clemency. Twice, Rubaie called for calm, before threatening any miscreants with expulsion.

Hands trembling, and speaking rather breathlessly, Zaidi began to restate his defence. He had not "intended to kill Bush or humiliate him" with his shoes, he said. When he saw "the occupiers' president" smiling, "I saw only Bush and it was like something black in my eyes". He added: "I had the feeling that the blood of innocent people was dropping on my feet during the time that he was smiling and saying bye-bye to Iraq with a dinner [with the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki]."

Zaidi's trial had begun on 19 February but was adjourned until yesterday as the judges considered a defence argument that the charge was not applicable because Bush was not in Baghdad on an official visit, having arrived unannounced without an invitation. Rubaie read a response from Maliki's office that said the visit had been official. Thus Zaidi would be tried under article 223 of the Iraqi penal code - dating from the Saddam era - which outlaws assaults on foreign leaders.

The chief defence lawyer, Dhia al-Saadi, demanded the charge be dismissed, saying that the case was one of insult not assault. His client's action "was an expression of freedom and does not constitute a crime". "It was an act of throwing a shoe and not a rocket," he said. "It was meant as an insult to the occupation."

Saadi cited the immediate reaction of the target of Zaidi's flying shoes, President Bush, as evidence of the lightness of the offence. After ducking behind a lectern, Bush had joked that he believed Zaidi wore a size 10, and added: "That's what people do in a free society, draw attention to themselves." He had not felt "in the least bit threatened", Bush had said. It was all to no avail.

After a 15-minute adjudication period, the court was cleared of all spectators, and Zaidi was handed a three-year prison sentence. His relatives erupted in anger, shouting that the decision was unjust and unfair. Some collapsed and had to be helped from the court. Others were forcibly removed by security forces as they shouted "down with Bush" and "long live Iraq".

"This judiciary is not just," Zaidi's brother Dargham said. Another brother, Uday, said the verdict was politically motivated. The journalist's sister, Ruqaiya, burst into tears, shouting: "Down with Maliki, the agent of the Americans." Zaidi's lawyers said he would appeal against the sentence.

If the Iraqi authorities were hoping to draw a line under the affair they are probably in for a shock. While some Iraqi officials regarded Zaidi's actions as an insult to the Iraqi state and he was criticised by fellow Iraqi journalists, who said he had allowed his emotions to overcome his professionalism, many ordinary Iraqis said he had already served his punishment and should be released. A poll released yesterday, commissioned by ABC News and the BBC, suggested 62% of Iraqis regard the shoe-thrower as a hero.

ΤΑ ΜΩΡΑ ΞΕΡΟΥΝ ΚΑΛΥΤΕΡΑ - YOU CAN'T FOOL A BABY! (Από την κ. Αναστασία Ιωαννίδου - Σαρωνίδα)

HOW GREEKS SAY GOODBUY TO BUSH ! - ΠΩΣ ΑΠΟΧΑΙΡΕΤΟΥΝ ΟΙ ΕΛΛΗΝΕΣ ΤΟΝ ΜΠΟΥΣ!

Bush's Last Press Conference: Full of Disappointment - TIME magazine

President George W. Bush, during his last news conference at the White House
J. Scott Applewhite / AP

By Massimo Calabresi / Washington
Monday, Jan. 12, 2009

In the current Administration's waning days, Americans have struggled to find a single word that would encapsulate history's judgment on the two-term presidency of George W. Bush. The left has offered disastrous, citing the damage they see inflicted on the country by Bush's foreign policy and economic stewardship. The right has countered with secure, arguing that another 9/11 was prevented by Bush's taking the fight to terrorists at home and abroad. But in what the White House says will be his final press conference on Monday, President Bush himself provided the word everyone has been looking for: disappointment.

The President used the word in one sense or another more than a dozen times in the course of his parting exchange with the White House media corps. But it was the quality, rather than the quantity, of its use that was most telling. The more he uttered disappointment, the more fraught it sounded, until it was delivered not just with his signature shoulder-hunching emphasis but with a kind of protestation that seemed to carry the full weight of his historic fall from nearly 90% approval ratings after 9/11 to his current tally of less than 30%, a record low. (Read "The Bush Presidency, Eight Years Later.")

Bush was asked yet again if he thought he had made any mistakes. As he has done since John Dickerson first asked him that question four years ago, the President ran for the safety of history. "There is no such thing as short-term history," he said, and he laid out his familiar assertion that his presidency will look different to historians than it does in its current historically unpopular state.

Bush then broke with his own tradition and weighed in on some mistakes. The "Mission Accomplished" banner brandished during his aircraft-carrier appearance two months after the invasion of Iraq gave the wrong impression about his and his Administration's assessment of progress in the war, he said. He then referred obliquely to mistakes in some of his own "rhetoric"; Bush has said that his vow to catch Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" and his challenge to America's adversaries to "bring 'em on," among other cavalier comments, were unhelpful, and that is presumably what he was hinting at here.

But Bush quickly moved on to things he wasn't sure he would count as mistakes; instead, he labeled them "disappointments." Among things Bush found disappointing: the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the failed response to Hurricane Katrina and the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after all. As the press conference continued, Bush kept coming back to the word. On the political environment in the capital, he said, "I am disappointed by the tone in Washington, D.C." He even predicted that Barack Obama will on occasion feel the same way. "There'll be disappointments, I promise you," he said. "He'll be disappointed. Sometimes the biggest disappointments will come from your so-called friends."

Even during the press conference, Bush appeared to recognize that he was overusing the word. While looking back at parts of his presidency that had fallen short, the President asserted that he wasn't feeling sorry for himself, and that to do so would be unseemly. He raised the most recent crisis to hit the country — the economic crisis — and said he scorned the idea of the "burden of office." "Why'd the financial collapse have to happen on my watch?" he mocked. "It's just pathetic, isn't it, self-pity?" (Read "Bush's Last Days: The Lamest Duck.")

In the end, though, there's a difference between self-pity and self-reflection, and it's not clear that Bush has made the distinction. True, he deserves credit for speaking so bluntly about so many of the things that went wrong during his presidency. And he is clearly working hard to understand what he might have done differently: he laid out in detail how he had reflected on whether or not he should have landed Air Force One in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, and argued passionately that in retrospect, he made the right decision in not burdening local officials with his presence.

But there is no shortage of observers, some of them historians, who are willing to point out where Bush's presidency went wrong. His over-reliance on a cadre of ideological advisers who steered him in the wrong direction is often the first error cited by critics. Vice President Dick Cheney's dominance led Bush to many of the decisions he now qualifies as disappointments, as did Donald Rumsfeld's bullying leadership at the Pentagon. Bush's own ideological inclinations against regulation certainly contributed to the financial crisis. And his inexperience in foreign affairs made him unrealistic about what freedom and democracy actually mean in much of the rest of the world.

But Bush, by his own admission, is still struggling to get a handle on where he went wrong. Asked a follow-up question about why Washington had remained so partisan despite his promise eight years ago to be a "uniter, not a divider," Bush said, "I don't know," and suggested asking others. Even his reaching for the safety of history reflects a kind of myopia. In that sense, Bush's final press conference was most revealing for what it showed about his inability to accept responsibility for his presidency. The difference between Bush's mistakes and his disappointments may just be that he hasn't yet taken ownership of the latter. But the American people have no difficulty connecting the failures on Bush's watch with the President's mistakes, which is why disappointment is the word they were looking for.

Read "Bush's Last Days: The Lamest Duck."