Conspiracy established

The flood of information on Bush administration's torture policies has clearly established a well-organized conspiracy that will definitely hold up in the court of law. It all started when President Bush signed the Executive Order of Feb 7, 2002 ordering the suspension of the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions in our treatment of detainees. This triggered a chain-reaction of flurry of legal activities within the Office of the Legal Counsel of the Justice Department, the Pentagon's legal counsel office, as well as Vice President's Legal Counsel David Addington. What is particularly important in this case is that it has been clearly established that those who drafted the torture memo KNEW they were violating the law at the time those memos were drafted.

The clear evidence of this is the fact that as early as December 2001, the Dept of Defense asked the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), which had devised the interrogation training of our own servicemen0--the similar methods were to be used against the detainees--to comment on these interrogation methods and if they were successful. Not only did the advice from the JPRA refer to these methods--including water-boarding--as "torture," but they were confused as to why the DoD wanted to use these interrogation methods to obtain intelligence in a fast manner. The whole point of these methods--initially used by North Koreans and the Chinese--was to extract FALSE information from our servicemen. This is why our PoWs were captured on camera saying that they believed in Communism, that the US was bad, etc. You know "The Manchurian Candidate" kind of staff. (The movie was actually inspired by these methods). So, for the administration to argue that they used these methods to gather information fast in order to prevent an attack is completely ridiculous. This is further confirmed by the memo of the former legal counsel to Condi Rice, Philip Zelikow who warned the administration that this would violate the US law and would be ineffective. Of course, both Zelikow's memo and the dissenting opinions of the JPRA were quashed, ignored, as the administration frantically proceeded to implement its torture policies. In fact, just a few days after a high-level visit to the GITMO by high officials of the Bush administration, GITMO started using the same methods. Once the war in Iraq started and Abu Ghraib became a US prison, the methods were employed there, as it was confirmed by the shocking photos we all saw in 2004.

So, why would the administration do this? It turns out that the torture of Abu Zubayda started when someone from the administration asked the CIA to probe him about Iraq-AlQ links. After the CIA interrogators said he did not know anything about such a link, they pushed the CIA to employ the tougher methods. Yes, the administration used torture for political purposes! In order to drum up the fake case for the war in Iraq!

This stuff is simply unbelievable. Attn General Eric Holder needs to appoint an independent and credible and respected Special Prosecutor, give him free reign, and allow him to follow the trail of evidence. What we have, from what we have learned in the last week or so, is a clear conspiracy to violate the law. This, in a nutshell, is a war crime.

I am increasingly confident the Obama administration will let its Justice Dept. do its constitutional duty.