Investigation time for the CIA and where it could lead–read Glenn Greenwald and Emptywheel for superb details.

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Read the NYT’s article about the CIA torture tapes and weep for how America is falling.

Then read the post by Scott Horton and feel ashamed for what’s transpired.

I believe in the transparency of democracy and how evil men will be found out and punished (most of the time) for what has been done to sully America’s name, but I wonder how long and how will it happen (if at all).

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Brent Brudowsky at The Hill’s Pundit Blog says it all:

As I write these words on the morning of Wednesday, Dec. 19, high- and low-level officials of the Bush administration involved in torture, and the destruction of the torture tapes, are consulting their criminal lawyers as The New York Times reports that highest-level lawyers in the administration had discussed the destruction of the tapes.

I predict there will soon be new stories about more torture tapes that were destroyed and new stories about more high-level officials that were either tainted or corrupted by this scandal, and others who opposed this travesty who will ultimately testify about who they approached to attempt to prevent it.

Washington and America will momentarily ask once again: What did the president and vice president know, and when did they know it?

In an administration facing an ocean of scandal on multiple and multiplying fronts, this scandal above all will be the Watergate of our times because it involves extremely probable crimes of torture, extremely probable obstructions of justice, and a steady stream of revelations that will only escalate until the inevitable special prosecutor is named.

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Whether intentional or not, one of the CIA’s own men went on national television and actually admitted that he water boarded (ie: tortured) a man under the CIA’s custody. The BBC has more info:

John Kiriakou told US broadcaster ABC that “water-boarding” was used when his CIA team questioned suspected al-Qaeda chief recruiter Abu Zubaydah.

He said it might be torture but that it “broke” the detainee in seconds.

I think what bothers me more is what he says afterwards:

“Like a lot of Americans, I’m involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that water-boarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the water-boarding technique. And I struggle with it.”

Excuse me? We as Americans signed onto the Geneva Conventions because we already intellectually, humanely, and morally believed that torture was wrong. Heck, the CIA even said such a thing back when the USSR was the ‘evil empire.’

Calipygian raises an interesting point:

 In effect, this guy has admitted to breaking the law, possibly even committing a war crime. Will he finger his superiors now? And remember - the Nuremburg defense didn’t save anyone after World War II.

but forgets one thing first in my opinion: How long until someone files a war crime suite within or outside of the United States against him?

All that of course should be tied in together with the White House refusal to comment and infamously state that this is an ongoing criminal investigation over the destruction of those tapes with the following takeaway by David Kurtz at Talking Points Memo:

 The key takeaway is that the White House counsel, presumably at the direction of the Department of Justice, has ordered the preservation of all White House documents pertaining to the CIA tapes.

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More and more information is coming out about the Bush Administration’s foray into torture by almost any means necessary in order to get acquire any information possible after 9/11.

Sadly, this is not confined to the US at this point as information previously came about about the use of foreign airports in Europe with likely permission of the respective governments and as of yet no inquiries or legal cases into finding out what was agreed upon, who knew what and why.

(more…)

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