Time for accountability for those behind US 'torture' tactics (Gloucester Times)

[struggle4progress]

Over the Cut
Tim Halsted

The New York Times reported Sunday that two senior al-Qaida suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had been waterboarded 266 times. After 35 seconds of waterboarding, Zubaydah declared he would tell interrogators anything they wanted to know. Nevertheless agents repeated the waterboarding 82 more times. Mohammed, waterboarded 183 times, later testified that he had confessed under torture to many acts he did not commit ...

But armed with the memoranda, President Bush apparently believed he could proudly assert that "The United States does not torture," because the Justice Department had told him that the approved interrogation techniques did not meet its contrived definition ...

... the United States has held, since the Nuremburg Trials, that "only following orders" is not an admissible defense. Indeed, Japanese prison guards who waterboarded American prisoners were found guilty of torture ...

... Former Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, Cheney's Chief of Staff David Addington, CIA Directors Porter Goss and Michael Hayden, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his assistants Douglas Feith, Stephen Cambone and William Haynes, and retired Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, all need to answer for their roles in condoning torture ...

http://www.gloucestertimes.com/puopinion/local_story_113230252.html