crossposted from Dailykos.com by SeaTurtle
In an Exclusive Interview and Breaking Story on Rachel Maddow tonight, she interviewed Philip Zelikow, counselor to Condoleezza Rice, who has now released that he strongly differed within the Bush Administration on the torture memoranda and set his opinions in writing.
The response from the Bush Administration was to try to round up all copies of his memo and destroy it.
Now that the Torture Memoranda have been declassified he is free to speak about his dissent.
Rachel opened her show tonight with a blockbuster exclusive interview, saying:
"The decision to release Office of Legal Counsel Memos re. torture has had one other ramification so far and it is this: Govt. officials who knew about torture but who were sworn to secrecy are now free to talk about it."
She said that new major news to report: Condoleezza Rices's counselor at the State Dept, Philip Zelikow, wrote a memo to the Bush Administration in which he argued that the legal opinions on torture were wrong. He gave competing advice to the Bush Administration, which responded by trying to destroy his memo.
The Zelikow Memo
The underlying absurdity of the 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. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.
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.
In My Opinion, this is a blockbuster revelation and may signal to others, with continuing declassification of documents by the Obama Administration, that it is time to come out with their dissent.
Clearly, the Bush Administration thought that there was something to hide if they tried to destroy his memo.
I am rushing to put this up so the community can follow this. Perhaps someone with better capabilities than me can embed the interview from RM's show tonight.
Let the Games Begin................................
UPDATE:
The interview is just fantastic. To me, it raises so many more questions.
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