Obama intentionally refuses to redact certain passages in torture memos, thus revealing that Bush has disappeared a “ghost detainee” in Iraq. This isn’t the only new revelation today from the documents, which are still being read by reporters:
The memos include what in effect are lengthy excerpts from the agency’s interrogation manual, laying out with precision how each method was to be used. Waterboarding, for example, involved strapping a prisoner to a gurney inclined at an angle of “10 to 15 degrees†and pouring water over a cloth covering his nose and mouth “from a height of approximately 6 to 18 inches†for no more than 40 seconds at a time.But a footnote to a 2005 memo made it clear that the rules were not always followed. Waterboarding was used “with far greater frequency than initially indicated†and with “large volumes of water†rather than the small quantities in the rules, one memo says, citing a 2004 report by the C.I.A.’s inspector general.
Today, this fact did not stop Michael Hayden and Mukasey from saying the exact opposite in a Wall Street Journal editorial:
The techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA.Â
The Bush torture enablers continue to lie up to this moment, because they were too lazy to even re-read the documents (which they had seen before anyway) after they were released yesterday, before lying in this editorial. They didn’t just commit war crimes, they continue to lie to the American people in an attempt to cover them up. It is no less than essential for the survival of the rule of law that they be prosecuted.
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