up he seizes on it to defend his position out loud in the press; Spitzer skewered him last night on CNN.
As important as I believe it is for Spitzer to have done that, my hope is that since Yoo is a young man, one day, I do think it
not inconceivable he is tried at The Hague. So KEEP TALKING YOO!
The Green Light was a great expose into the likes of Yoo, Addington and the Bush Regime.
SNIP*
But Sands’s work is important because he has looked carefully at the chronology: what came first, the decision to use torture techniques, or the legal rationale for them?
Gonzales and Haynes laid out their case with considerable care. The only flaw was that every element of the argument contained untruths. The real story, pieced together from many hours of interviews with most of the people involved in the decisions about interrogation, goes something like this: The Geneva decision was not a case of following the logic of the law but rather was designed to give effect to a prior decision to take the gloves off and allow coercive interrogation; it deliberately created a legal black hole into which the detainees were meant to fall. The new interrogation techniques did not arise spontaneously from the field but came about as a direct result of intense pressure and input from Rumsfeld’s office. The Yoo-Bybee Memo was not simply some theoretical document, an academic exercise in blue-sky hypothesizing, but rather played a crucial role in giving those at the top the confidence to put pressure on those at the bottom. And the practices employed at Guantánamo led to abuses at Abu Ghraib.
The fingerprints of the most senior lawyers in the administration were all over the design and implementation of the abusive interrogation policies. Addington, Bybee, Gonzales, Haynes, and Yoo became, in effect, a torture team of lawyers, freeing the administration from the constraints of all international rules prohibiting abuse.
Sands’s article and book put “the torture team”–the group of more than a half dozen Bush Administration lawyers who gave the green light for the introduction of torture–into sharp focus.
The lawyers in Washington were playing a double game. They wanted maximum pressure applied during interrogations, but didn’t want to be seen as the ones applying it—they wanted distance and deniability. They also wanted legal cover for themselves. A key question is whether Haynes and Rumsfeld had knowledge of the content of these memos before they approved the new interrogation techniques for al-Qahtani. If they did, then the administration’s official narrative—that the pressure for new techniques, and the legal support for them, originated on the ground at Guantánamo, from the “aggressive major general” and his staff lawyer—becomes difficult to sustain. More crucially, that knowledge is a link in the causal chain that connects the keyboards of Feith and Yoo to the interrogations of Guantánamo.
When did Haynes learn that the Justice Department had signed off on aggressive interrogation? All indications are that well before Haynes wrote his memo he knew what the Justice Department had advised the C.I.A. on interrogations and believed that he had legal cover to do what he wanted. Everyone in the upper echelons of the chain of decision-making that I spoke with, including Feith, General Myers, and General Tom Hill (the commander of SouthCom), confirmed to me that they believed at the time that Haynes had consulted Justice Department lawyers. Moreover, Haynes was a close friend of Bybee’s. “Jim was tied at the hip with Jay Bybee,” Thomas Romig, the army’s former judge advocate general, told me. “He would quote him the whole time.” Later, when asked during Senate hearings about his knowledge of the Yoo-Bybee Memo, Haynes would variously testify that he had not sought the memo, had not shaped its content, and did not possess a copy of it—but he carefully refrained from saying that he was unaware of its contents. Haynes, with whom I met on two occasions, will not speak on the record about this subject.
Sands notes the focal role that the torture lawyers saw for the Attorney General’s opinion power. It was, as Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith suggested in a recent book, a device that could be used to give a sort of pardon in advance for persons undertaking criminal acts.
in full:
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/04/hbc-90002779