Mr. Philip D. Zelikow was a deputy to Condi Rice. He appeared tonight on the Rachel Maddow show. He has written an article over at Foreign Policy about his counter-memo (dissenting opinion) to the OLC torture memo's.
In other words, he wrote a dissenting opinion to Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury's fuckery about how it was legal to hang people from the ceiling, deprive them of sleep, slam them into walls..etc. On Maddow's show he discusses how the Bush Administration attempted to destroy every available copy of his counter-memo. The final two paragraphs below:
The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.It is worth your time to read his article and also watch his interview on Rachel's show. I will of course post the Maddow video when it becomes available within the next hour. Update: It's available.
In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest -- if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution.
Eric Holder needs to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate this gross transgression of the rule of law. There can be no other way to get to the bottom of who was ultimately responsible.
