CIA General Counsel Nominee (Rizzo) Stands By Torture

[babylonsister]

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/06/19/rizzo-torture/

CIA General Counsel Nominee Stands By Torture

Today, the Senate Intelligence Committee held a confirmation hearing for John Rizzo, President Bush’s nominee to become the C.I.A.’s general counsel.

Rizzo has served as an acting general counsel “off and on for the past six years, serving without Senate confirmation.” During his tenure, the CIA has engaged in a wide variety of highly questionable and potentially illegal interrogation practices.

In 2002, Rizzo approved of a memo drafted by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that stretched the definition of torture in order to make torture permissible in the course of an interrogation. To be torture, the Bybee memo concluded, physical pain must be “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

Sen. Ron Wyden asked Rizzo at the hearing, “Do you think you should have objected at the time?” to the Bybee definition of torture. Rizzo answered, “I honestly — I can’t say I should have objected at the time.” To which Wyden replied, “I think that’s unfortunate because it seems to me that language on a very straightforward reading is over the line. And that’s what I think all of us wanted to hear — is that you wish you had objected.” Watch it at link~

Also during the hearing, Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) asked Rizzo “whether we’ve ever rendered detainees to countries which use torture.” Rizzo said “it’s difficult to give a yes or no answer” in a public hearing and asked that he provide an answer in closed session. Levin noted that in Dec. 2005, Bush said “we do not render to countries that use torture.”

[Solly Mack]

1. I'm just so proud

[Raven]

2. I know. I keep asking myself...where were these people raised?

What planet? This is so completely foreign from what I learned as values as a kid. I really don't understand how things could go so wrong so fast.

[Solly Mack]

3. I ask myself the same thing.

and "How" were they raised?

[WinkyDink]

4. The only sane thing to do is to "interrogate" Rizzo just this side of that definition.

Break every bone in his body, including skull, for starters.

[Solly Mack]

5. How did the confirmation come out? He moving on to a full vote?

[babylonsister]

8. I don't know; I can't find any info yet. nt

[Solly Mack]

9. Here's some background

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19214162/site/newsweek/page/0/

A CIA lawyer who played a key role in approving some of the agency’s most controversial post-9/11 operations—including the use of interrogation techniques that have been criticized as torture—is scheduled to be grilled in public next week when he appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee for confirmation as the agency’s general counsel.

Congressional officials (who asked not to be identified talking about non-public matters) told NEWSWEEK that Democrats on the committee recently decided to allow Rizzo's confirmation hearing to go ahead after the administration finally turned over some of the documentation they had been seeking.

Barring a woeful performance by Rizzo, the Intelligence Committee is likely to approve his nomination, according to two congressional sources (although one GOP source noted that some leading Republican senators regard the nominee with “indifference”).

[Supersedeas]

6. behind closed doors

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

7. Sounds like a perfect fit for the well known humanitarian services the CIA has always conducted.

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

10. OMFG!!! And he is going to be APPROVED???

:cry:

FUCK!!! :grr: I am living in a nightmare. WE are living in a nightmare!!!!

[Solly Mack]

11. Worse. This is a night terror.