(Suzanne Ito writes for and manages Blog of Rights, the blog of the national ACLU.)

June 26 of this year marked the International Day in Support of Torture Victims, and the anniversary of the United Nations' Convention Against Torture. On that day, the ACLU joined countless other human rights groups in calling for Accountability for Torture. We asked people to send Attorney General Eric Holder the Office of Legal Counsel memos—the actual evidence released through ACLU lawsuits that revealed the fact that high-level Bush administration officials had sanctioned these illegal acts—and urged him to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate these crimes.

We were pleased when Newsweek's Daniel Klaidman reported that Holder was indeed considering an investigation. But now a month has passed, we haven't heard much from the Justice Department. So last week, the ACLU renewed its call for accountability by launching a new video, featuring director Oliver Stone, composer Philip Glass, Rosie Perez, and many others reading from the torture memos, and calling for accountability.

The public knows that detainees were tortured during the Bush presidency. From the photos from Abu Ghraib, to congressional reports (PDF), to the torture memos themselves, it's crystal-clear that these abusive interrogation practices were authorized by the highest levels of the Bush administration. Even Dick Cheney couldn't resist a little cheerleading about how effective he thought waterboarding was.

It is a core premise of American democracy that no one—not even the president—is above the law. When we hear Attorney General Holder is considering only investigating those who carried out the torture, not those who authorized the torture in the first place, it sickens us to think how this clashes with the most fundamental American ideals of fairness. Too much evidence of high-level orders exists to limit criminal investigations to "a few bad apples." We cannot compromise the rule of law because we're afraid the outcome might be politically messy, inconvenient or even painful. To not investigate is to tell future presidents and their administrations that they're above the law, and that would render our system of justice meaningless.

So please watch the video, and send it to Attorney General Holder. It's time for a comprehensive investigation of the Bush era torture policies.

Jesse Ventura has been going on TV a lot lately because he's promoting his new book, but he's been littering the airwaves with the carcasses of dead conservative talking points when it comes to the topic of torture and George Bush.

Elisabeth Hasslebeck had had the misfortune of trying to tackle Ventura earlier on The View, and had been exposed for the moron she is, especially on torture. So Ventura was on "Hannity" last night and much the same kind of complete and utter smackdown proceeded.

Best of all, get this: Sean Hannity thinks America is better off after George Bush instead of before. I'm serious. I'll do a Conservative/Pelosi impression on him and say that he's either a very sick man mentally a complete liar, a hairpiece hag or all three.

Hannity also did his teleprompter bit on Obama. Here's just a few of Hannity's insane ramblings (buckle up, it's a rough ride). Sean tried his best to get Jesse to bite on the "Bush inherited a rescession" bit -- which, um, didn't go very well...

Ventura: You're telling me that the United States was better off after George Bush or before him?

Hannity: After.

Ventura: Oh, my God. How can you make that statement?

Hannity: I just did..and I'll tell you why...

Ventura: It's ridiculous...This country was far better off (No.) before George Bush then it is after George Bush.

Hannity then read off his usual list of Islamofascist horrors confronting America and he asks Ventura what he would do.

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The hysteria has reached new heights by FOX News as they spin the Pelosi outrage as far as it can go. How far is that? The CIA will just stop working and America may be attacked because of her. Wingnut Du Jour, ex-CIA agent and FOX Newser Wayne Simmons said that Pelosi has. What is the impact of Nancy Pelosi saying that the CIA lied to her and members of Congress? We're doomed!!!

Simmons: The best thing about not being a diplomat or a politician is that I can tell you that first and foremost Nancy Pelosi, the woman whose third in line to be President of the United States, the Speaker of the House is a pathological liar and her attacks on the CIA, the release of the CIA memos has so sent a chill through the CIA to guys like me who were not only interrogated in our entire careers, but ran interrogations and interviews that I can assure you that we are not going to go the extra mile EVER in this climate to secure information and intelligence that's going to protect the Untied States so understand that the American people need to, this has directly affected the National Security of the United States.

Martha MacCallum: The Church Commission in the seventies and eighties, a lot of people think that those cracked down on our intelligence and made them very hesitant to do the job that hey needed to do and that those failures may have led to September eleventh.

Martha MacCallum, the FOX host, actually blames the Church Committee for the 9/11 attacks, and Simmons agrees. They always bring it back to 9/11. The FISA courts were instituted because of the Church Committee.

Simmons paints the CIA as one big chickenshit outfit that can't take a little criticism from the big bad Nancy Pelosi. They will even abandon their posts and let terrorists attack the country because their itty-bitty feelings are so hurt. I say they should all quit right now if Simmons is correct.

This clip also speaks volumes about the type of agent Simmons is. Don't call me names or I'll let Cleveland get bombed. Of course the CIA would never do that, but that's how coordinated this attack of Pelosi is by the entire right wing. Doesn't the media ever get tired of the robotic responses by the Right whenever they want to push a narrative to the American people?

Will any media member ask Dick Cheney why HE never released any memos when he was in power? is that too much to ask. He's playing games right now and trying to suck the media and the American people in.
Dick Cheney was having a grand old time defending torture, saying that he wasn't in the torture business, but hey, we waterboarded a few people because his buddies at the OLC helped him out. He was spinning his web and telling us that the OLC and the Bush administration acted within the law when they starting waterboarding prisoners on Face the Nation. He denies that they ever used torture. Cheney also said George Bush knew and approved everything they did. I guess when he said we didn't use torture his was misleading America.

He also used the GOP talking point that we used the same techniques on our own troops in the SERE program so it ain't torture. His daughter (Liz Cheney) learned a lot from him because she used the same defense to Norah O'Donnell which didn't even pass her smell test.

He absolutely wouldn't change a thing and still wants more memos released. When will journalists ask Cheney why he didn't released these documents when he was in power? Bush was taking a tremendous amount of heat over the torture issue at the time.
Schieffer was asking him if he would allow himself to be questioned about these topics and go "under oath." Cheney dodged the question by saying he'd have to look into it legally and see what precedent he would set , but he's talking now. He WILL NEVER go under oath.

SCHIEFFER: Senator Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was on this broadcast recently. And I said, do you intend to ask the former vice president to come up? And he said if he will testify under oath. Would you be willing to testify under oath?

CHENEY: I'd have to see what the circumstances are and what kind of precedent we were setting. But certainly I wouldn't be out here today if I didn't feel comfortable talking about what we're doing publicly. I think it's very, very important that we have a clear understanding that what happened here was an honorable approach to defending the nation, that there was nothing devious or deceitful or dishonest or illegal about what was done.

He's just trying to justify torture and he's using TV to promote his views. Let's see if he'll go on with Lawrence O'Donnell and face some real questions. If Cheney will never appear with another guest or interviewer that uses facts to question him with, what makes you think he'll go in front of Leahy?

CBS has the full transcript and you can read more below the fold:

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Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is upset that President Obama released Office of Legal Council memos that justified harsh interrogation tactics like waterboarding.

"What we're seeing now in a very sad way is bitter, partisan attacks on the Bush people, as much as we've seen since the McCarthy era. The way they're putting specific people at risk for prosecution is unprecedented in the modern era," Gingrich told Fox's Chris Wallace.

Sean Hannity is so upset that Barack Obama believes waterboarding is torture. He's dumbfounded that one of the great intellects of the conservative movement, George Bush committed war crimes by breaking the Geneva Conventions:

McCain: I believe torture is unacceptable and a violation of the Geneva Conventions. I believe however that these memos were not necessary to be released. We cannot criminalize people giving bad legal advice which is what some in the Congress want to do and it's time to move on.

Hannity: Do you think that what President Obama said the other night, what I believe the waterboarding that was used was torture, that President Bush was sanctioning torture?

McCain: I believe it was wrong to waterboard. I think it was wrong to do it because it's in violation with the Geneva Conventions, but I think we've got to move forward. We must move forward.

Giving advice that allows our country to torture is not criminalizing politics, but enforcing laws and treaties we faithfully signed on to. "Just turning the page" is Beltway talk for "getting a free pass."

I'm not sure why Hannity even bothered bringing this up with McCain. I guess he figured that if he brought it up in the context that Bush sanctioned torture, he would get McCain to change his tune. I know math isn't one of Hannity's strong suits so I'll give him a little math equation. If 1+1=2, then if waterboarding=torture and Bush approved of it, then:

Bush+waterboarding=the sanctioning of torture.

Not content with its past role in screening candidates for positions in the Bush judiciary and Justice Department, the conservative Federalist Society is back to defend the Bush torture team it helped create. Ironically, the Federalists' conference call Monday came just three days after McClatchy reported that Steven Bradbury - one of its members and a figure at the center of the storm over the release of the OLC torture members - refuted their claim that the military's SERE training program proved the United States did not torture terror detainees.

As Politico reported, the National Review hosted a media conference call featuring many of the usual suspects among the Bush torture apologists:

The lawyers' group, which was a pipeline for judges in the Bush White House, is hosting a call this morning with National Review writer Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, lawyer David Rivkin, and Chapman University Law School Dean John Eastman.

Their claim, as Politico noted, was that the "much-criticized memos from the Office of Legal Counsel were perfectly reasonable." McCarthy brushed off the CIA's use of waterboarding on terror suspects by proclaiming "they were not going to be killed by the tactic." Eastman, whose university is hosting Federalist Society member and Bush torture architect John Yoo as a visiting professor, insisted the treatment was no worse than that undergone by American service personnel:

Eastman responded to The New York Times's Scott Shane about the use of waterboarding during the Spanish Inquisition and by the Japanese military, and responded "that psychological reviews of graduates of the military's SERE program, in which members of the U.S. military were waterboarded, is a more relevant example.

"Why would I go and look at something the Spanish Inquisition did just because it was also called 'waterboarding'?" he asked.

Perhaps because, as the Bush Office of Legal Counsel chief and 2005 torture memo author Steven Bradbury concluded four years ago, "SERE trainees know it is part of a training program."

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They just can't seem to get their stories straight. No matter how hard they try to justify torture, the facts don't seem to support them:

WASHINGTON — The CIA inspector general in 2004 found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to recently declassified Justice Department memos.

That undercuts assertions by former vice president Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials that the use of harsh interrogation tactics including waterboarding, which is widely considered torture, was justified because it headed off terrorist attacks.

[...] "It is difficult to quantify with confidence and precision the effectiveness of the program," Steven G. Bradbury, then the Justice Department's principal deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in a May 30, 2005, memo to CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, one of four released last week by the Obama administration.

"As the IG Report notes, it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks. And because the CIA has used enhanced techniques sparingly, 'there is limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness'," Bradbury wrote, quoting the IG report.

Nevertheless, Bradbury concluded in his May 2005 memos that the program had been effective; that conclusion relied largely on memos written after the still secret report by Inspector General John Helgerson.

Helgerson also concluded that waterboarding was riskier than officials claimed and reported that the CIA's Office of Medical Services thought that the risk to the health of some prisoners outweighed any potential intelligence benefit, according to the memos.

The IG's report is among several indications that the Bush administration's use of abusive interrogation methods was less productive than some former administration officials have claimed.

Reading the planted story in the Washington Post to somehow try and draw a little sympathy for Judge Jay Bybee is practically an admission that he believes the memo he's credited with writing wasn't sound legal analysis at all, and in fact he does believe that the argument he used to try to absolve these interrogation techniques of their criminal nature was in reality a ruse. Either his "how-to guide" for CIA agents to avoid violating the Geneva Conventions was a lie or he never wrote it in the first place and just signed off to make it official. In the Washington Post piece, friends and anonymous sources are sprinkled in to try and make us like the judge. He's just a man who never wanted to work at the OLC anyway and he's full of regret.

"On the primary memo, that legitimated and defined torture, he just felt it got away from him," said the fellow scholar. "What I understand that to mean is, any lawyer, when he or she is writing about something very complicated, very layered, sometimes you can get it all out there and if you're not careful, you end up in a place you never intended to go. I think for someone like Jay, who's a formalist and a textualist, that's a particular danger."

Tuan Samahon, a former clerk who recalled Bybee's remarks at the reunion dinner, said in an e-mail that the judge defended the legal reasoning behind the memos but not the policy decision. Bybee was disappointed by what was done to prisoners, saying that "the spirit of liberty has left the republic," Samahon said

.
That is his alibi and I'm sure David Broder's eyes welled up with tears after he finished reading the piece. A man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, wait ... wait ... wait ... he was at the right place at the wrong time in history because what he really wanted was to be on the 9th Circuit Court and just took the gig at the OLC because Alberto had nothing for him. Well, his loyalty paid off because now he's a sitting judge with a lifetime appointment on the bench he longed for.

"The whole idea that the Constitution is based on a kind of wariness of mankind's tendency to grab power, that is an idea I got from Jay," McAffee said. "So the whole idea of uninhibited executive power, from him, does seem passing strange."

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John McCain admitted to Bob Schieffer on Face The Nation that the US violated the Geneva Conventions under George W. Bush regarding the abusive treatment of prisoners.

You know, that torture thing.

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN (Ranking, Armed Services Committee): First of all let me repeat what you just said, Bob. I have opposed torture. It's violation of the Geneva Conventions. I worry about treatment of Americans in future conflicts.

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: The-- the allegations are that they gave the wrong counsel that’s and—- and that bad things were done. And we violated fundamental commitments that the United States of America made when we signed the Geneva Conventions. And we disregarded what might happen to Americans who are held captive in the future. And by the way, those who say our enemies won’t abide the Geneva Conventions they will if they know there’s going to retribution for their violation of it.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Let me ask you about this quickly, Jay Bybee who was one of the people at the Justice department that wrote the memos that gave the CIA what they call the legal reasons to go ahead with all this, he’s now a federal judge. We understand that he very much regrets, or at least he’s told people, he regrets having written those memos. Do you think that he should be impeached or do you think that he should resign or you-- you think he should be left alone?

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: Well, a resignation would be a decision he would have to make on his own. But he falls into the same category as everybody else as far as giving very bad advice and misinterpreting fundamentally what the United States is all about, much less things like the Geneva Conventions. Plus--under President Reagan we signed an agreement against torture, we’re in violation of that...

So tell me what are the penalties for violating the Geneva Conventions? John McCain freely admitted that our great country violated the agreements we signed up for. Is it an act of vengeance that the people who broke those treaties should be prosecuted or is it just following the law?

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I'm torn, I really am. What Bybee did was amoral and despicable, and he deserves to be impeached. But it's not too difficult to figure out that Bybee is being made a sacrifice of sorts. The Villagers are hoping if they throw him under the bus, it will appease the angry mobs. The other thing is, he's much easier to hold culpable and punish than the rest of them. (He's Lynndie England.)

Of course Bybee should suffer consequences - no argument here. But don't forget, the people at the top made the policy decisions. Don't be distracted by someone who is essentially low-hanging fruit, even if the Post is trying to protect him with this story (composed mostly of anonymous sources):

Five years along in his new life as a federal judge, Bybee gathered the lawyers and their dates for a reunion, telling them he was proud of the legal work they had together produced.

And then, according to two of his guests, Bybee added that he wished he could say the same about his previous position.

It was, in the private room of a public restaurant, the kind of joyless judgment that some friends and associates say the jurist arrived at well before the public release of four additional memos last week and the resulting uproar that has engulfed Washington. One of the documents, dated Aug. 1, 2002, offered a helpfully narrow definition of torture to the CIA and soon became known as the "Bybee memo," because it bore his signature.

"I've heard him express regret at the contents of the memo," said a fellow legal scholar and longtime friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity while offering remarks that might appear as "piling on." "I've heard him express regret that the memo was misused. I've heard him express regret at the lack of context -- of the enormous pressure and the enormous time pressure that he was under. And anyone would have regrets simply because of the notoriety."

That notoriety worsened this week as the documents -- detailing the acceptable application of waterboarding, "walling," sleep deprivation and other procedures the Bush administration called "enhanced interrogation methods" -- prompted calls from human rights advocates and other critics for criminal investigations of the government lawyers who generated them.

[...] Still, in the years since the original Bybee memo was made public, his misgivings appeared evident to some in his immediate circle.

"On the primary memo, that legitimated and defined torture, he just felt it got away from him," said the fellow scholar. "What I understand that to mean is, any lawyer, when he or she is writing about something very complicated, very layered, sometimes you can get it all out there and if you're not careful, you end up in a place you never intended to go. I think for someone like Jay, who's a formalist and a textualist, that's a particular danger."

Tuan Samahon, a former clerk who recalled Bybee's remarks at the reunion dinner, said in an e-mail that the judge defended the legal reasoning behind the memos but not the policy decision. Bybee was disappointed by what was done to prisoners, saying that "the spirit of liberty has left the republic," Samahon said.

I'm hearing serious rumors that the newly disgraced Judge Jay Bybee may not have actually written the CIA memos under his byline, but acted like a stenographer on the torture issue while he was John Yoo's boss. I'm in the process of investigating these allegations.

An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan, who was involved back in 2002 goes public and blows the lid off of the Republican talking points about torture:

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use. It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.
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There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.
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One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.

Please read the full op-ed and because a man like Ali would never have come forward unless the endless piles of horse dung being thrown around by torture apologists, Republicans, and Liz Cheney hadn't made him gag with revulsion. He shreds every sadist talking point on this subject, and he should get a medal for coming forward.

Rep. John Boehner got a little honest today when he admitted that we used "torture."

Boehner: Last week, they released these memos outlining torture techniques and that was clearly a political decision and ignored the advice of their Director of National Intelligence and their CIA director.

As the Huff Post notes:

Boehner said at a press conference in the Capitol.

The techniques discussed include waterboarding, slamming detainees into walls, and depriving them of sleep for up to 11 days.

Boehner argued that a discussion of such torture techniques was "inappropriate," as it could tip off U.S. enemies to the tactics used and "denigrate" the United States and its allies. Torture is illegal under U.S. and international law.

Now here come Michael Steel to clean up Boehner's mess.

Regarding his use of the T-word, Boehner spokesman Michael Steel writes, "It is clear from the context that Boehner was simply using liberals' verbiage to describe these interrogation techniques. The United States does not torture."

Hahaha...

During our most excellent Live chat with the ACLU's Chris Anders, he revealed this very disturbing fact while answering your questions.

On holdover appointees from the Bush days, here is one that ought to get everyone on the phone to their member of Congress and the White House right now ---

Did you know that Panetta has kept John Rizzo as Acting CIA General Counsel? If you look at the newly released Justice Department memos, they were all addressed to John Rizzo. Truly unbelievable that he is still in charge of legal advice at the CIA.

What shocking news.
Here's the ACLU website with some documents addressed to John Rizzo.

A 18-page memo, dated August 1, 2002, from Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF] A 46-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF] A 20-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF] A 40-page memo, dated May 30, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF]

As far as I'm concerned, anyone involved in memos penned by Jay ByBee and Steven Bradbury should not be working for the Obama administration.
I googled Rizzo's name and found this post from Marcy:

This suggests it's likely that Rizzo knew that CIA was intending to do one thing with waterboarding but tempering the description of that in the OLC memo. Also, I outlined ways in which it appears the information Rizzo provided to OLC was, at a minimum, under dispute when it was given. In other words, Rizzo may well be the key person who manipulated the OLC process to legalize torture.

As I've written many times, the OLC was compromised by the Bush administration.

The OLC, which is a component of the Justice Department, was created to provide objective legal advice to the Attorney General and to resolve legal disputes among federal agencies. During the Bush administration, however, the OLC became a facilitator for illegal government conduct, issuing dozens of memos meant to permit gross violations of domestic and international law. Some of these memos have become public through leaks to the media and through the ACLU's litigation under the Freedom of Information Act. But most of them are still secret.

David "I can't talk about torture because al-Qaeda may be watching
Addington was the puppet master of the OLC. It's not surprising that in 2007, the Bush administration withdrew his name.

The White House on Tuesday withdrew the nomination of John A. Rizzo to become the Central Intelligence Agency’s top lawyer amid mounting opposition from Democrats over his role in the harsh interrogation of C.I.A. detainees. The nomination of the 32-year agency veteran to become general counsel is the most prominent casualty of the partisan fight over the spy agency’s program of detaining and questioning top terrorism suspects since the Sept. 11 attacks.
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Mr. Rizzo has been the C.I.A’s acting general counsel on and off for most of the past six years, including the period in 2002 when the Bush administration was constructing a legal foundation for the agency’s then-secret detention and interrogation program.

At a Senate hearing in June, Democrats pressed Mr. Rizzo about whether he agreed with a 2002 Justice Department memorandum that gave legal guidance to the C.I.A. program. The memorandum argued that nothing short of the pain associated with organ failure constituted illegal torture.

The memorandum was issued in response to a request from the agency to authorize a slate of interrogation techniques to be used in secret jails abroad. Among the techniques was one known as waterboarding, a method that induced a feeling of drowning. Mr. Rizzo said in June that he raised no objections at the time to the Justice Department opinion but said that he now believed it was “overbroad for the issue that it was intended to cover.”

He's still the "acting counsel" because Stephen Preston has not been confirmed yet. There needs to be some heavy scrutiny on Rizzo and fast.