[Ppnews] Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/scahill04242009.html

April 24-26, 2009


Congress was Briefed in Real Time on Bush-Era Torture Tactics. Is 
That Why They Prefer Whitewash Commissions and Closed Door Hearings?

Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

By JEREMY SCAHILL

There are not exactly throngs of Democratic Congressmembers beating 
down the doors of the Justice Department demanding that Attorney 
General Eric Holder appoint a special Independent Prosecutor to 
investigate torture and other crimes. And now it seems that whatever 
Congress does in the near term won't even be open to the public. 
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said this week that he 
prefers that the Senate Intelligence Committee hold private hearings. 
The chair of the committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has asked the 
White House not to take any action until this private affair is 
concluded. She estimates that will take 6-8 months.

"I think it would be very unwise, from my perspective, to start 
having commissions, boards, tribunals, until we find out what the 
facts are," Reid said Wednesday. "I don't know a better way of 
getting the facts than through the intelligence committee." It is 
hard to imagine other Democrats bucking Reid on this and there is 
certainly no guarantee that the committee will release an 
unclassified report when it concludes its private inquiry. While 
Representative John Conyers says he will hold hearings, that is not 
the same as the independent criminal investigation this situation warrants.

Then there is the deeply flawed plan coming from the other 
influential camp in the Democratic leadership. The alternative being 
offered is not an independent special prosecutor, but rather a more 
politically palatable counter-proposal for creating a bi-partisan 
commission. This is a very problematic approach (as I have pointed 
out) for various reasons, including the possibility of immunity 
offers and a sidelining of actual prosecutions. Michael Ratner from 
the Center for Constitutional Rights has also advocated against this, 
saying this week it will lead to a "whitewash:"

We have reached a critical political moment on this issue. Obama has 
been forced or pushed to open the door to prosecutions, an opening I 
thought would take much longer to achieve. If there was ever a time 
to push that door open wider and demand a special prosecutor it is 
now. We have documented and open admissions of criminality. We have 
Cheney and Hayden admitting what they approved these techniques; and 
Cheney saying he would approve waterboarding again. We have the 
Senate Armed Services Report detailing how the torture program was 
authored and approved by our highest officials in the White House and 
employed in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan. And we have thousands 
of pages of proof. There is public outrage about the torture program 
and the media in the U.S. and the world are covered with the U.S. misdeeds.

So at this moment, instead of human rights groups getting together 
and calling for a special prosecutor what do they do? Call for a 
commission. What this call does and it must be said strongly is take 
the pressure off what is the growing public push for prosecutions and 
deflects it into a commission. Outrage that could actually lead to 
prosecutions is now focused away and into a commission. Think if this 
list of human rights groups had demanded prosecutions. We would be 
closer and not farther from the goal.

There are some powerful Democrats who certainly would not want an 
independent public investigation, particularly those who served on 
the House and Senate Intelligence Committees when Bush was in power 
and torture was being ordered and authorized. That's because in the 
aftermath of 9/11, some in Congress were briefed on the torture 
methods in real time and either were silent or, in some cases, 
supported these brutal tactics or, as some have suggested, possibly 
encouraged them to be expanded.

While Republicans are flailing to find ways of defending all of this 
torture and attempting to discredit or marginalize those who speak 
out against it, it is interesting to note the Op-ed Thursday in The 
Wall Street Journal by Reprentative Pete Hoekstra, the ranking 
Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 
called "Congress Knew About the Interrogations." In the piece where 
Hoekstra parrots the Dick Cheney blah-blah-blah about torture 
working, he manages to make an important point:

[M]embers of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them 
since the program began in 2002. We believed it was something that 
had to be done in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to keep 
our nation safe. After many long and contentious debates, Congress 
repeatedly approved and funded this program on a bipartisan basis in 
both Republican and Democratic Congresses.

Hoekstra cites the internal memo written last week by Obama's 
Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, to his staff in 
which Blair said "[h]igh value information came from interrogations 
in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding 
of the al Qa'ida organization that was attacking this country." (This 
was the memo that was originally released to the public with that 
sentence conveniently ommitted).

Hoekstra writes:

Members of Congress calling for an investigation of the enhanced 
interrogation program should remember that such an investigation 
can't be a selective review of information, or solely focus on the 
lawyers who wrote the memos, or the low-level employees who carried 
out this program. I have asked Mr. Blair to provide me with a list of 
the dates, locations and names of all members of Congress who 
attended briefings on enhanced interrogation techniques.
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) added to this mix by saying 
that he had seen a partial list of Congressmembers "who were briefed 
on these interrogation methods and not a word was raised at the time, 
not one word."

Among those on the House Intelligence Committee at the time was 
current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She has said, "we were not, I 
repeat, we were not told that waterboarding or other enhanced methods 
were used."

"What they did tell us is that they had some legislative counsel ... 
but not that they would. And that further, further the point was that 
if and when they would be used they would brief Congress at that time."

But contrary to Pelosi's assertion, The Washington Post reported that 
Pelosi and other Democrats were "given a virtual tour of the CIA's 
overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had 
devised to try to make their prisoners talk:"

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was 
waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as 
torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on 
that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers 
in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough 
enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

[...]

"Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of 
what the CIA was doing," said [Porter] Goss, who chaired the House 
intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA 
director from 2004 to 2006. "And the reaction in the room was not 
just approval, but encouragement."

Only a complete and independent investigation by a special prosecutor 
could get to the bottom of all of this with any credibility. In his 
Op-ed, Hoekstra wrote:

Any investigation must include this information as part of a review 
of those in Congress and the Bush administration who reviewed and 
supported this program. To get a complete picture of the enhanced 
interrogation program, a fair investigation will also require that 
the Obama administration release the memos requested by former Vice 
President Dick Cheney on the successes of this program.

While one must take anything Representative Hoekstra and his 
belligerent, torture-loving colleagues say with a grain of salt (to 
put it mildly), he has a point--even if he is making it in that Dick 
Cheney kind of way. All of the documents relating to this torture 
program should be released and the role of everyone involved should 
be brought out into the light of day to determine who is responsible 
for every aspect of these heinous crimes from top to bottom.

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for 
the national radio and TV program Democracy Now, has spent extensive 
time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin 
Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/156858394X/counterpunchmaga>Blackwater: 
The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.His new website 
is <mailto:RebelReports.com>RebelReports.com




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