Did Rockefeller's question on torture lead to a Bush coverup?

by: Carnacki

Mon May 04, 2009 at 10:52:27 AM EDT

But put in the context of Jello Jay's ten month quest to force the Administration to assess whether or not its torture program violated (among other things) the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, the behavior of the Administration makes much more sense.

Jello Jay demanded they review whether we were complying with CAT--and he insisted that they deal with not just the Fifth, but also the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Bradbury came up with a very clever response, if you don't mind the idea of US citizens in a county jail hanging "from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest." And then Zelikow called him on it.

Zelikow demonstrated to the Administration that they had not solved the problem Jello Jay had given them ten months earlier.

So David Addington or some other enforcer did the only thing he could do to do to maintain the fiction that the Administration had answered Congress' questions: rip up Zelikow's dissent.

Remember how we said that destroying the memo was evidence of criminal intent--an attempt to preserve the appearance of good faith reliance on Steven Bradbury's memos? All the more so when Zelikow was making the same point Congress was making.

Often it's the coverup of the underlying offense that gets people in Washington caught.

On a related torture topic, Tim F. has a post on how torture was seen as highly ineffective in gathering intelligence during World War II and the best interrogators never resorted to it.

Just think if we had followed the British method instead with our prisoners becoming double-agents. Osama bin Laden could be dead or in prison. Instead we gave bin Laden a recruitment tool.