An internal watchdog office at the Justice Department is investigating whether Bush administration lawyers violated professional standards by issuing legal opinions that authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, officials confirmed yesterday.
H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the Office of Professional Responsibility, wrote in a letter to Democratic lawmakers that his office is investigating the "circumstances surrounding" Justice opinions that established a legal basis for the CIA's interrogation program, including a now-infamous memo from August 2002 that narrowly defined torture and was later rescinded by the department.
By happenstance, there's a movie playing at the Royal Theatre this weekend called Taxi To The Dark Side, by Alex Gibney. It's up for best documentary feature at the Academy Awards this weekend.*
* Update: It won! Gibney gave pretty much the only political acceptance speech of the night:
Thank you very much, Academy. Here’s to all doc filmmakers. And truth is, I think my dear wife Anne was kind of hoping I’d make a romantic comedy, but honestly, after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, that simply wasn’t possible. This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us: Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver, and my father, a Navy interrogator, who urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law. Let’s hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and back to the light. Thank you very much.
Gibney's narrative thread is wrapped around the tragic story of Dilawal, a young Afghan cab driver who went into the U.S.-operated Bagram Prison in December 2002 and came out dead five days later. The U.S. Army news release said "natural causes." His death certificate read "homicide."
His legs were "pulpified," according to a U.S. military coroner. Had Dilawal lived, his legs would have required amputation because of the tissue damage he suffered. Dilawal wasn't resisting. He was shackled. The guards were just trying to shut him up. According to some in the film, Dilawal was crying for his mother at one point.
Dilawal's case was investigated and prosecuted, but as with Abu Ghraib, the investigations looked down. Gibney's film looks up. W-a-a-a-a-y up.
The film looks into the memo mentioned in the W-P story, but then reveals that one of the memo's chief critics -- Alberto Mora, then Navy general counsel, someone who had been considered a reliable, rock-ribbed Republican team player -- felt he had been "circumvented" and that while the memo may have been withdrawn, the practices it sanctioned were continuing.
Mora began blowing the whistle in December 2002. The infamous Abu Ghraib photos came out in April 2004. Obviously no one was listening.
Gibney draws lines from Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay right back to the White House and Pentagon.
To quickly sum up, Gibney makes the argument that the Bush administration made the decision to take the gloves off, and its minions in the military and elsewhere in the administration created a climate where they made the rules ambiguous but put pressure on underlings for intelligence results from interrogations.
As a result, you get a phenomenon euphemistically known as "force drift," which can lead to things like scared young Afghan men getting their legs pulpified while screaming for their mother.
I don't have time to give much more detail tonight, but I would definitely recommend this film. I just wouldn't recommend on planning for supper afterwards; I can guarantee you won't have an appetite.
Meanwhile, for some insight into the American mindset, check out this graf from a New Yorker story about the CIA's black sites and the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 9/11's chief architect:
Soon after Mohammed’s arrest, sources say, his American captors told him, “We’re not going to kill you. But we’re going to take you to the very brink of your death and back.”
There's also this post about former CIA official Michael Scheuer talking about extraordinary rendition: 'They're not Americans and I really don't care.'
But finally, check out this blast at former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, over the Maher Arar affair:
This Leahy quote deserves to be singled out:
"It is beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon for human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured."