For starters, Bush insisted that torture was legal. He bought into the official legal reviews on it, hook, line, and sinker. If his administration’s legal counsels said that no international or domestic law can bind him to legal culpability in times of war, then the advice must have been sound. Everybody dealing with the top terror-suspect Abu Zubaydah believed that he ‘wouldn’t talk except by using torture.’

For Bush (upon the advice of the people in his presidential circle), the use of torture was ‘designed to be safe,’ as well as compliant with US laws, US Constitution, and US treaty obligations. After all, even the US Department of Justice had reviewed ‘the authorized methods extensively, and determined them to be lawful.’ On Feb. 7, 2002, he even declared that the Geneva Conventions will not be applicable to the move.

The biggest glitch, of course, was that Bush failed to tell Congress that he had already allowed the use of torture. That was one legal requirement he missed. Congress got wind of it only after Abu Zubaydah had already been waterboarded.

But the biggest tragedy of Bush in this torture ruckus was that he was the President of the United States of America. Besides being ultimately accountable, he was also fundamentally superior. Everyone else in the administration was simply a subordinate to him. The Bush circle insists that ‘if he authorized it, it couldn’t be torture.’ As Condoleezza Rice said: “By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations in the Convention Against Torture.”

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Via salon.com

There is now such a thing as the Bush administration’s Torture 13. They belong to the nefarious circle by virtue of authorizing torture to be systematically employed in the name of information gathering post-9/11 for the sake of intelligence. They carried out the strategy, as well as legally justified it. All these point to the creation of a torture regime during the Bush administration.

Bush VP, Dick Cheney, reportedly ordered the implementation of torture. Counsel to the VP, David Addington, actually fought for the commander-in-chief’s impunity from any law that prohibits torture. White House counsel and attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, ‘wrote and reviewed a number of the legal opinions that attempted to immunize torture.’

Military psychologist and consultant, James Mitchell, gave official approval to torture, monitored Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation, observed the use of ‘borderline torture,’ and allowed waterboarding under his supervision (reportedly, ‘a total of 183 times in a month for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 83 times in a month for Abu Zubaydah’). Former US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, approved the use of torture in the military scope, taking after the CIA methods.

The rest of the members of the dubiously vaunted and infamous circle are CIA people and top-notch government lawyers. As to national security advisor (2001-2005) and Secretary of State (2005-2008), Condoleezza Rice, as well as George W. Bush, himself, it is sufficient to think that the concept of democracy is tantamount to bureaucracy, making the accountability for torture reach all the way to the top.

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Via salon.com

According to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the United States is working on a “durable and sustainable” ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas at Gaza. This ceasefire is planned to avoid the situation where the Hamas can continue to launch rockets aimed at Israel. The air strikes that have been going on, launched by Israel, are retaliation to the rockets fired by the Hamas in the first place.

Rice said she does not plan to travel to the Middle East at the present time. Perhaps, the reason for this is because a ceasefire can happen very soon. All the protests currently happening across the globe against the bombardment of Gaza are putting tremendous pressure on Israel to stop the air strikes. The US would want to make sure that the next round of ceasefire will be impervious to a repetition of the current scenario. Hundreds have been killed and thousands wounded because of the Israeli offensive on the Hamas’ territory, some of them innocent civilians and children.

Rice has been known to plug the holes in the interventionist foreign policy of her White House boss. She did it in Iraq and is expected to do it in Gaza, too. Well, until later this month when a new president takes over Bush, and Hillary replaces her. Obama, not quite inclined to be interventionist, would want to make amends with the old US enemies for a change. Hillary, on the other hand, is about to face the Taliban as the centerpiece of Obama’s foreign policy is ending the militant insurgency in Afghanistan.

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Via Reuters