If you felt like your nation betrayed your conscience when you witnessed the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, you can blame Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft. If you felt like the atrocities of Abu Ghraib were reprehensible and the use of tactics such as waterboarding utterly reprehnsible, blame none other than Condoleeza Rice.
According to the [report], which compiles legal advice provided by the Bush administration to the CIA, Rice personally conveyed the administration’s approval for waterboarding of Zubaydah, a so-called high-value detainee, to then-CIA Director George Tenet in July 2002.
In May 2002, Rice, along with then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales met at the White House with the CIA to discuss the use of waterboarding. Rice played a greater role than she admitted last fall in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee but dissenting legal views about the severe interrogation methods were “brushed aside repeatedly.”
The military and the CIA even attempted to dissuade the use of torture-[a] training unit warned that harsh physical techniques could backfire by making prisoners more resistant. They also cautioned about the reliability of information gleaned from the severe methods and warned that the public and political backlash could be “intolerable.”
In the years that followed, according to the narrative issued Wednesday, there were numerous internal legal reviews of the program, suggesting government attorneys raised concerns that the harsh methods, particularly waterboarding, might violate federal laws against torture and the U.S. Constitution.
But Bush administration lawyers continued to validate the program.
Of Course, thanks to the tireless efforts of Senator Carl Levin and the rest of the Senate Armed Services Committee report, the Bush Administration’s assertion that Abu Ghraib was merely an accident and an outlier has been systematically exposed as the lie that it was.
You can see Senator Carl Levin’s public statement on MSNBC here.
