Thursday, December 13, 2007
Never hitch your wagon to a 1000 year Reich
They never last as long as they promise. The CIA is re-learning this lesson now as the furor over the destroyed tapes continues.
The news is not all dreary, there is a bit of comic relief from John Yoo about 2/3 down.
For six years, Central Intelligence Agency officers have worried that someday the tide of post-Sept. 11 opinion would turn, and their harsh treatment of prisoners from Al Qaeda would be subjected to hostile scrutiny and possible criminal prosecution.Just what did they expect when they went over the line based on the word of a fool.
Now that day may have arrived, after years of shifting legal advice, searing criticism from rights groups — and no new terrorist attacks on American soil.
The Justice Department, which in 2002 gave the C.I.A. legal approval for waterboarding and other tough interrogation methods, is reviewing whether agency officials broke the law by destroying videotapes of those very methods.
The Congressional intelligence committees, whose leaders in 2002 gave at least tacit approval for the tough tactics, have voted in conference to ban all coercive techniques, and they have announced investigations of the destruction of the videotapes and the methods they documented.
“Exactly what they feared is what’s happening,” Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, said of the C.I.A. officials he advised in that job. “The winds change, and the recriminations begin.”
The news is not all dreary, there is a bit of comic relief from John Yoo about 2/3 down.
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