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Bush/Cheney Pulled Torture Strings

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"I expect that you will appreciate and protect an amazing gift you have received as an employee of the Department of Justice," Comey said. "It is a gift you may not notice until the first time you stand up and identify yourself as an employee of the Department of Justice and say something whether in a courtroom, a conference room or a cocktail party and find that total strangers believe what you say next.

"That gift the gift that makes possible so much of the good we accomplish is a reservoir of trust and credibility, a reservoir built for us, and filled for us, by those whowent before most of whom we never knew. They were people who made sacrifices and kept promises to build that reservoir of trust.

"Our obligation as the recipients of that great gift is to protect that reservoir, to pass it to those who follow, those who may never know us, as full as we got it. The problem with reservoirs is that it takes tremendous time and effort to fill them, but one hole in a dam can drain them.

"The protection of that reservoir requires vigilance, an unerring commitment to truth, and a recognition that the actions of one may affect the priceless gift that benefits all. I have tried my absolute best in matters big and small to protect that reservoir and inspire others to protect it."

Though the full import of Comey's speech was not apparent at the time, it now appears he was referring to the legal gamesmanship that had undercut the Justice Department's traditional commitment to the rule of law and enabled the Bush administration to engage in torture and other abuses of power.

Hoping for Accountability

At the start of the Obama administration, some civil libertarians and constitutionalists hoped that there would be some accountability for the torturers and their accomplices in the Bush administration. But those hopes have been dashed.

The OPR investigators did conclude that Yoo and Bybee violated "professional standards" and deserved possible disbarment as lawyers. [Yoo is now a tenured law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Bybee is a federal appeals court judge in San Francisco.]

But career prosecutor David Margolis, who was put in charge of reviewing the OPR's findings, downgraded the criticism to simply "poor judgment," which means the Justice Department won't refer their cases to state bar associations.

Meanwhile, Cheney has lashed out at even the mildest suggestion that there might be some accountability. He also has spoken up in defense of waterboarding and of the people in the OLC and the CIA who made it possible.

In his Feb. 14 interview on ABC's "This Week," Cheney pronounced himself "a big supporter of waterboarding," although it has been regarded as a form of torture since the Spanish Inquisition and has long been treated by U.S. authorities as a serious war crime, such as when Japanese commanders were prosecuted for using it on American prisoners during World War II.

But Cheney was unrepentant about his support for the technique. He answered "yes" when asked if he had opposed the Bush administration's decision to suspend use of waterboarding after it was employed against three "high-value detainees" sometimes in repetitive sequences. He added that waterboarding should still be "on the table" today.

Cheney then went further. Speaking with a sense of impunity, he casually undercut a key line of defense that senior Bush officials had hidden behind for years that the brutal interrogations were approved by independent Justice Department legal experts who thus gave the administration a legitimate reason to believe the actions were within the law.

Cheney acknowledged that the White House had guided the Justice Department lawyers.

In responding to a question about why he had so aggressively attacked Obama's counter-terrorism policies, Cheney explained that he had been concerned about the new administration prosecuting some CIA operatives who had handled the interrogations and "disbarring lawyers with the Justice Department who had helped us put those policies together. "

"I thought it was important for some senior person in the administration to stand up and defend those people who'd done what we asked them to do."

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at
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