Somehow this is news:
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.
The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.
Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.
The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Well no s&%t sherlock. Of course they were advised and approved of the techniques. So was Congress, where in one of the meetings to advise them of the techniques they asked that the interrogation be harsher. Congress did not deem waterboarding illegal so why in the hell wouldn’t they use the technique on the worst of the worst to gain what turned out to be valuable intelligence.
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It’s amazing that detailed decisions of this type were decided at the very highest level of government. It shows how concerned Administration officials were to do the right thing and protect the American people at the same time remain within the law.
And the fact that waterboarding was used only 3(?) times underscores how reluctant the Administration was to engage in aggressive tactics.
All the hours and hours and hours that Dems and their “peace” activist allies spent catterwalling about waterboarding might have given an impression to the less well informed that we did it all the time. Many more people were waterboarded by Code Pink in protests than by the U.S. government to save American lives.
It’s interesting, though, that Congressional leaders, in particular the Democratic leaders, were pushing for more aggressive, harsher interrogation techniques. And, the “legal panels” assembled by the various MSM outlets agreed the harsher interrogation techniques were legal and within the constitutional authority of the President as military commander in chief. These “legal panels” also declared those captured on the battlefield were not entitled to any GC or constitutional protections because they were illegal combatants. Even “Johnny Taliban” was (and is) not entitled to such protections, including after his transfer from military custody to federal custody because of his battlefield capture.
I wonder what the next, “new” thing the MSM will discover.