Late last night, I came across a newly published report from the Senate Intelligence Committee in which they discuss the draft fiscal authorization bill for 2010 intelligence operations. In an astounding move, it appears to me that the bill will call for all intelligence activities, both covert and all other intelligence gathering activities, to be reported and and for the appropriate legal authorization to be cited in the report. Further, they are calling for a report by December 1 in which the intelligence community must report on all detention and interrogation practices and to show how they are legal under all relevant laws and the Convention Against Torture. This seems to me to be a major breakthrough, and yet the only press reports I've seen discuss other aspects of the bill. A diary is linked at my name.

There's been a link to the pdf for about an hour over in the most recent thread at Emptywheel. It's linked at my name.

There's also a response from CREW. They find this to be a pretty pitiful attempt on Gibbs' part.

Here's where I get stuck: Inherent in Holder's position that he will only prosecute those who exceeded Yoo's permission memos in torturing is the basic assumption that those who followed Yoo's memos "in good faith" will not be prosecuted. Why do we not hold Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, Yoo, Rizzo, Tenet, Goss, Rice, Ashcroft, Mukasey and others to the same standard? Any independent analysis of existing US and international law, along with relevant international treaties will show that the creation of the "torture permissions" was far from a good faith effort to keep interrogation within the bounds of the law. There is quite a bit of evidence that the desire was to torture and the exercise was one of finding the most loopholes possible to make it "legal".

The relentless work of Glenn Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler, Jeff Kaye, Scott Horton, Andy Worthington, ondelette and others provides many "smoking guns" of bad faith on the part of those who constructed this house of cards. Marcy especially has pointed out multiple instances of John Rizzo lying to Yoo to set the scenarios for several of the memos.

If low level CIA interrogators are to be prosecuted for "bad faith", even a cursory look will find plenty of evidence for "bad faith" at the very highest levels of our government.

In fact, refusing to prosecute these high level officials becomes a bad faith effort on the part of Holder and Obama.

bring on the clowns

I think the clowns have done enough damage. Let's bring on prosecutors who know what they are doing and put the clowns who organized this in jail.

[I realize you meant something entirely different with what you said; I just couldn't resist. *g*]

Over at The Seminal, acquarius74 has posted a link to a very interesting interactive quiz in which we try to identify the sources of various quotations. I've linked the quiz site at my name. One of the questions (which I have edited just a bit to remove two clues) is particularly on topic for this post:

These so-called ill-treatments and torturing /snip/ , stories of which were spread everywhere amongst the people, and particularly by detainees /snip/, were not, as assumed, inflicted methodically, but by individual leaders, sub-leaders , and men who laid violent hands on them.

Who made that statement ?

John Ashcroft, referring to Abu Graib

Donald Rumsfeld, referring to Guantanamo Bay

Rudolf Höss, referring to Auschwitz

Emperor Hirohito, referring to Manchuria

With my editing, the quote could be attributed to any of the four candidates. The point is that throughout history, when governments have instituted programs of torture and abuse, those at the top have always tried to claim that the abuse is not the result of those who put the programs into place, but a few "rogue elements" who went beyond the reasoned, legal boundaries set up by those in charge.

Should Holder decide to prosecute only those exceeded Yoo's authorizations, we take our place in history alongside the German concentration camps and Japanese atrocities in Manchuria.

For those who want to complete the quiz and self-report their scores, the diary is at: http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/6538