By Eric W. Dolan
Thursday, April 5, 2012 0:05 EDT
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Wednesday night explained a legal memo
that advised the Bush Administration that so-called enhanced
interrogation techniques were torture and therefore illegal.
Wired reporter Spencer Ackerman obtained the memo, written by State Department counselor Philip Zelikow, through a Freedom on Information Act request.
Bush told NBC’s Matt Lauer in 2010 that he authorized the use of
enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding because his “lawyer
said it was legal, said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act.”
But Zelikow’s memo warned the Bush Administration in 2006 that the
interrogation techniques used on terror suspects by the CIA were “a
felony war crime.”
“As
a top lawyer at the Bush State Department, Philip Zelikow circulated
the memo within the Administration that said, essentially, that the
Administration was kidding itself in trying to say that there was some
way around the law,” Maddow explained. “They were trying to give a legal
green light to CIA interrogator to torture people, but that green
light, he said, was a sham.”
In 2009, Zelikow said that the Bush Administration attempted to collect and destroy all copies of the memo.
“If the Republican Party were the still the party of John McCain,
this would open up a whole new can of political worms,” Maddow said,
“because the Obama Administration, remember, looked into Bush
Administration ordered torture and they decided not to prosecute any of
it.” READ MORE
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