Thursday, April 23, 2009

Time To Indict Condi Rice For Torture

Jay Bybee, John Yoo and other senior Bush Administration figures have already been fingered for their roles in making torture "legal" for the government. Whether they had written the memos or passed them along, they played a part in shaming our once proud nation by committing those despicable acts. Cheney has been called out before too, but for the most part the upper echelon of Bush's people have not been touched. Now though, it looks like former Secretary of State Rice had intimate knowledge and approval of, torturing terrorist suspects.

From RawStory:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The CIA first sought in May 2002 to use harsh interrogation techniques including waterboarding on terror suspects, and was given key early approval by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, a US Senate intelligence document said.

The agency got the green light to use the near-drowning technique on July 26, 2002, when attorney general John Ashcroft concluded "that the use of waterboarding was lawful," the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a detailed timeline of the "war on terrorism" interrogations released Wednesday.

Nine days earlier, the panel said, citing Central Intelligence Agency records, Rice had met with then-director George Tenet and "advised that the CIA could proceed with its proposed interrogation of Abu Zubaydah," the agency's first high-value Al-Qaeda detainee, pending Justice Department approval.
Though Rice was the first of the inner circle to approve of torturing suspects, Ashcroft, Cheney and Gonzales were all there with her on this from the beginning. Since we have this declassified report out in the open, the only and natural next step is for Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor and draw up charges for every single man and woman that decided to spit on the honor of our country and disregard the basic tenets of decency and morality for humankind.