Word: memoed
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...seem to care about the President's Mesopotamian malfeasance in November, so why get all het up about it now? The astounding news that the Bush Administration was involved in reinterpreting the rules for the use of torture-a fact that has been known since the relevant Justice Department memo was leaked last June-has occasioned ... nothing, not even a burp of public outrage. John Kerry chose not to mention Abu Ghraib once during the presidential debates and, further, chose not to raise the issue of Bush Administration complicity because, I am told, his advisers were afraid that the Republicans...
...second round-and then disappeared for the day. Senator Charles Schumer spent his time nattering on about Senate filibuster rules. But Senator Patrick Leahy did induce Gonzales to admit that, as White House counsel, he had consulted with the Justice Department's office of legal counsel about the torture memo. There were meetings in his White House office. Techniques like waterboarding-in which a detainee is strapped down and made to believe he may be drowned-may have been discussed. Gonzales allowed that he could not quite recall specifically how he felt about waterboarding, but he did generally support...
...civilians. But physical assault is something else entirely. The world now knows that the Bush White House at least tacitly approved the loosening of standards that led to the outrages of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo-and that no one of significance has been sacked for it. True, the offending memo was recently retracted, but the Administration's position on torture remains astonishingly fuzzy. When asked by Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois if U.S. personnel could legally engage in torture under any circumstances, Gonzales said, "I don't believe so, but I'd want to get back to you on that...
Within a few months, as the invasion of Afghanistan reached its climax, hundreds of captured al-Qaeda fighters and irregulars fighting for the Taliban regime were shipped to the naval base at Guant??namo Bay for interrogation. Gonzales wrote a memo to Bush in January 2002 that described aspects of the Geneva protocols as "quaint" and "obsolete." A few weeks later, Bush signed an order deeming al-Qaeda combatants "unlawful" and thus not deserving of prisoner-of-war status or the protections Geneva provided. "The war on terrorism," wrote Bush, "... ushered in not by us but by terrorists, requires...
...According to a July 2004 memo signed by a top FBI official, FBI agents reported that they had seen prisoners subjected to physical mistreatment, loud music, extreme temperatures and a lack of food, water and furniture. An FBI agent there observed that one detainee who had been left in a cell where the temperature had climbed above 100?? "was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night...