“Guidebook to False Confessions”: Key Document John Yoo Used to Draft Torture Memo Released

Public Record

Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye have another exclusive over at Truthout on the origins of Bush’s torture program. Kaye and Leopold report:

In May of 2002, one of several meetings was convened at the White House where the CIA sought permission from top Bush administration officials, including then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to torture the agency’s first high-value detainee captured after 9/11: Abu Zubaydah.

The CIA claimed Zubaydah, who at the time was being held at a black site prison in Thailand, was “withholding imminent threat information during the initial interrogation sessions,” according to documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2009.

So, “attorneys from the CIA’s Office of General Counsel [including the agency's top lawyer John Rizzo] met with the Attorney General [John Ashcroft], the National Security Adviser [Rice], the Deputy National Security Adviser [Stephen Hadley], the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council [John Bellinger], and the Counsel to the President [Alberto Gonzales] in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possible use of alternative interrogation methods that differed from the traditional methods used by the U.S.”

One of the key documents handed out to Bush officials at this meeting, and at Principals Committee sessions chaired by Rice that took place between May and July 2002, was a 37-page instructional manual that contained detailed descriptions of seven of the ten techniques that ended up in the legal opinion widely referred to as the “torture memo,” drafted by Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attorney John Yoo and signed by his boss, Jay Bybee, three months later. According to Rice, Yoo had attended the Principals Committee meetings and participated in discussions about Zubaydah’s torture.

That instructional manual, referred to as “Pre-Academic Laboratory (PREAL) Operating Instructions,” has just been released by the Department of Defense under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The document sheds additional light on the origins of the Bush administration’s torture policy and for the first time describes exactly what methods of torture Bush officials had discussed – and subsequently approved – for Zubaydah in May 2002.

Holder says secret executive branch reviews of evidence for ‘targeted killings’ count as due process

End the Lie
Madison Ruppert

Attorney General Eric Holder has become such a farcical character with the Fast and Furious scandal (which he has been busted lying to Congress about), his attempt at debating the definition of lying with Representative James Sensenbrenner, and now his claim that the executive branch’s secret review process of the evidence against alleged terrorists counts as due process.

In his speech Monday at Northwestern University Law School in Chicago, Illinois, Holder actually argued that the process surrounding the approval of so-called “targeted killings” (which are, in fact, assassinations) meets the constitutional requirement for “due process” and that American citizenship does not protect anyone from being murdered by the government of the United States.

Meanwhile, the federal government says that the program is so secret that they cannot even confirm or deny its existence.

“Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security,” Holder argued. “The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.”

I seriously doubt that the founding fathers thought that a future government would actually exploit the language so as to have a wholly unaccountable, unlegislated entity giving the green light on the murder of American citizens and call such a ludicrous practice “due process.”

Holder’s speech attempted to broadly outline the Obama administration’s supposed guidelines for their assassination program, even though the government has avoided all real legal challenges since they know such a laughable argument is unlikely to hold up in a court of law.

He stated that the American government could legally murder an alleged senior operational al Qaeda leader who is taking an active role in planning to kill Americans if they meet three basic requirements; they pose an imminent threat of violence, they could not feasibly be captured and the operation is conducted in line with war principles.

Of course, the Department of Justice hasn’t used such a supposed legal justification in court, instead opting to claim it is so secret they cannot even address it, thus avoiding the issue entirely.

Holder just continued to get more absurd; claiming that such operations do not violate the executive order which supposed bans assassinations or any other criminal statutes because the murder is committed in self defense.

He even went on to dispute the label of “assassinations,” claiming that the “use of that loaded term is misplaced” since an assassination is illegal while these targeted killings are supposedly legal in the eyes of the increasingly demented American federal government.