Former Bush Official Zelikow Decries Bush Interrogation Techniques (ABCNEWS)

[jefferson_dem]

Former Bush Official Zelikow Decries Bush Interrogation Techniques
April 23, 2009 6:11 PM

For this week's ABC News Shuffle Podcast we interviewed former Bush State Department official Philip Zelikow.

You can listen to the Podcast on iTunes or by clicking HERE.

Zelikow, former counselor at the State Department under Secretary Condoleezza Rice, recently wrote a piece for Foreign Policy in which he discussed the memo he wrote in May 2005 after hearing of the memos coming from the Justice Department coming up with legal justifications for harsh interrogation techniques for detainees, the so-called Office of Legal Counsel "torture memos."

"I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable," Zelikow writes. "My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo."

Zelikow asserts that the "underlying absurdity of the (Bush) administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. ... In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest -- if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution."

Zelikow told us that from his work as executive director of the 9/11 Commission, "I know what these guys (in al Qaeda) did -- at least some of them -- and I've no sympathy for them. But this is not about who they are. This is an issue about who we are, and what we are willing to do cruelly, deliberately over time to other human beings raises certain moral issues for us that I think are important for people to consider. You know, we've been in very tough wars before in the United States, but we'd never adopted an interrogation program like this, even for high value captives like the Nazis, the Japanese or other very important captives."

He wondered: "Did folks really think Americans would never learn what we were doing in this program? That they'd think that it was going to stay a secret forever? ... My conclusion then is it was inevitable that the American people were going to learn about this stuff. And when you dig a really deep hole, you ought to think a little bit about whether you have a ladder to climb out of it."

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http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/04/former-bush-off.html

[DURHAM D]

1. No one who followed the 9/11 Commission hearings/report

believes anything this a-hole has to say.

His only purpose - CYA CYA CYA CYA CYA CYA...