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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (473040)	4/17/2009 10:13:58 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575352

Congress Knew All Along "long before “waterboarding” entered the public discourse, the C.I.A. gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods ..." Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at Washington College of Law, American University, is a research fellow of the Hoover Institution. I do not minimize the seriousness of the interrogation techniques approved and used by the U.S. government. No one today, including me, would say that the techniques in the newly released memos were anything less than brutal and ugly. Today in 2009, when we are worried about the economy and not so much about the possibility of new terrorist attacks like that on Mumbai, many people now want to say that these techniques are obviously torture and so someone needs to be prosecuted for them. But as the Washington Post reported in December, 2007: Yet long before “waterboarding” entered the public discourse, the C.I.A. gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge. With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. Most prominent among those briefed on waterboarding was Nancy Pelosi. According to the Post’s interviews, members of the Congressional oversight committees understood that they had to weigh the limits of inhumane treatment of people known to have Al Qaeda connections against the threat of new attacks. They believed that these techniques struck the right balance in the circumstances. Yet I haven’t heard of any serious call for prosecuting Speaker Pelosi or any of her colleagues for complicity in torture. Even today, with sizable Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and a Democratic president, waterboarding is not specifically prohibited as torture under the criminal law. Such a law could be passed at any moment and signed by President Obama — and yet it has not happened. Why not? We could end the debate over what is acceptable and not, now and into the future, by explicit legislation on what constitutes criminal torture — indeed, Congress could do so by simply running through the list of techniques in the released memos. I believe that Congress should be forced to make hard political choices. The costs to democratic society of not explicitly declaring as a matter of criminal law what is permissible and what is not are today far greater than the benefits of ambiguity. We are caught yet again, as Jack Goldsmith put it in “The Terror Presidency,” in the cycle of timidity and aggression. We condone aggressive techniques when the threat is perceived to be large enough, but then repent it later on, and propose to assuage our consciences afterward by going after those who did or approved those things. Yet why are members of Congress who knew, and failed to object, any less complicit than the officials who designed, approved, or carried out the program? Neither Professor Cole nor Mr. Ratner mentions Congress’s oversight role in all of this. The Obama administration has merely said the obvious about not prosecuting the C.I.A. line officers. You can’t change the rules of the game after the fact. You can’t prosecute those who relied in good faith on the legal conclusions of their superiors — and who knew that those superiors included senior members of Congress. roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com