Quiz-3: Sen Intel Ch DianneFeinstein’s 2014 War w/Pres Obama

[johnkarls]

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Third Short Quiz
Senate Intel Chair Dianne Feinstein’s 2014 War w/Pres Obama


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Part I – These questions about the 3 Guardian articles’ description of Sen Feinstein’s 2014 War w/Pres Obama pertain to the focus of our 5/10/2017 meeting which is Authoritarian Rule by Our Intelligence Services.

1. Does Guardian author Spencer Ackerman provide zillions of examples in which the CIA lied to the Senate Intelligence Committee and/or its staff during the course of their investigation of the CIA’s techniques and practices for interrogating terrorists and alleged terrorists?

2. Did the ability of the Senate Intelligence Committee and/or its staff to know that the CIA was lying cause the CIA to suspect that they had CIA records that had either been leaked or hacked?

3. Was this the reason that the CIA launched an investigation to ascertain how the Senate Intelligence Committee Staff obtained those CIA records?

4. Was the CIA investigation illegal since its targets were U.S. citizens?

5. With regard to America’s current state of affairs in which our Intelligence Services feel free to illegally leak classified information in order to eliminate from our Democratic Government anyone with whom they are displeased, does this 2014 history of obvious lying and history of illegally surveilling U.S. citizens give us any assurance that George Orwell’s 1984 is not “just around the corner”???

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Part II – These questions about the 3 Guardian articles address the substantive focus of the articles (interrogation techniques) which is NOT the focus of our 5/10/2017 meeting (Authoritarian Rule by Our Intelligence Services).

[These questions come from the materials for our half-dozen meetings that have focused over the years on interrogation techniques, including studying nearly a dozen U.S. Supreme Court decisions since 9/11 whose texts are posted on http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org.]

6. Are author Spencer Ackerman’s 3 Guardian Articles based on the explicit premise stated in the third article that is posted on http://www.ReadingLiberally-SaltLake.org in the Reference Materials section for our 5/10/2017 meeting as follows --

“But before 9/11, US laws were unequivocally against torture…” --

and the unstated premise that water boarding has always been recognized as torture?

7. If Spencer Ackerman’s premises are true, then why did Tim Russert as Moderator of the first Democratic Presidential Debate in the 2008 election cycle on 9/26/2007 at Dartmouth College inform candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton, after she had answered negatively the “ticking time bomb” question (“We know there’s a big bomb going off in America in three days and we know this guy knows where it is. Don’t we have the right and responsibility to beat it out of him?”), THAT THIS HAD BEEN THE OFFICIAL POLICY OF PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON?

8. If Spencer Ackerman’s premises are true, then why in 2005 did Congress feel it was necessary to pass the McCain-Feingold “Detainee Treatment Act” which provided: “No individual in the custody or physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment”?

9. BTW, did the McCain-Feingold “Detainee Treatment Act” of 2005 provide a legal defense in “any civil action or criminal prosecution” for any action that “the President or his designees…officially authorized and determined to be lawful”?

10. If Spencer Ackerman’s premises are true, then why did Sen. Ted Kennedy from 2005 until the end of the Bush Administration on 1/20/2009 try to “have his cake and eat it too” by asking every Bush appointee who needed Senate confirmation and whose position had anything to do with National Security whether “water boarding” was “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” under the McCain-Feingold Detainee Treatment Act of 2005?

11. “Having his cake and eating it too” by getting the Bush Administration to say that “water boarding” that had been official policy under President Bill Clinton was “cruel, inhuman or degrading” without Sen. Kennedy, himself, having to take any blame if 10 million Americans were nuked IAW Osama bin Laden’s famous fatwā – (A) about which the Founding Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government wrote a famous book on how to deal with it (whose recommendations have been ignored despite endorsement from the 9/11 Commission Co-Chairs and such luminaries as Tim Russert and Tom Brokaw), (B) which can NOT be revoked now that ObL is dead, and (3) which is STILL THE SACRED DUTY of all of ObL’s followers which include every member of Al Qaeda, ISIS (formerly Al Qaeda in Iraq), etc.?

12. Indeed, wasn’t the last Bush nominee with whom Sen. Kennedy pulled this stunt Michael Mukasey who served as Attorney General 11/9/2007 – 1/29/2009 ONLY AFTER President Bush announced that if Sen. Kennedy persisted with his filibuster, President Bush would LEAVE VACANT the position of Attorney General for the remaining 15 months of his Presidency?

13. Wasn’t the technical legal issue that there were no legal determinations of whether specific interrogation techniques constituted “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” in either U.S. or international law -- EXCEPT by the European Court of Human Rights which has jurisdiction over 47 signatory countries and which decided in 1978 in litigation brought by the Irish Republican Army against The United Kingdom that 5 specific techniques were NOT “torture” -- "wall standing” (spread eagle with fingers high above the head and feet back so that the prisoner is standing on his toes so that all his weight falls on his fingers), “hooding” (permanently except during interrogation), subjection to loud and continuous hissing noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink -- EVEN WHEN ALL 5 WERE EMPLOYED SIMULTANEOUSLY FOR DAYS AT A TIME?

14. Did the so-called Bush Administration “torture memos” essentially adopt the decision of the European Court of Human Rights while adding to the European Court’s list “water boarding” which had been the official policy of President Bill Clinton? BTW, did CIA Director Michael Hayden advise incoming President Obama in 2009 that sleep deprivation had never failed to get a prisoner to talk after several days?

15. Did the so-called Bush Administration “torture memos” provide the “legal defense” given interrogators under the McCain-Feingold Detainee Treatment Act of 2005?

16. Did Sen. Kennedy then try to “end CIA torture once and for all” by requiring in the Intelligence Authorization Bill of 2008 “all U.S. governmental agencies, including the CIA, to comply with the Army Field Manual’s prohibition on torture” (quoting from Sen. Kennedy’s 2/13/2008 blog on huffingtonpost.com)?

17. Was this provision vetoed by President Bush? Was there not even an attempt to override the veto since the margins for passage in both Houses of Congress had been so thin?

18. Did Sen. Kennedy’s 2008 failed attempt even address the Intelligence Services long-standing practice of “rendition” of prisoners to countries such as Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan for interrogation?

19. Upon taking office in January 2009, did President Obama sign an Executive Order providing that all governmental personnel, including CIA interrogators and private contractors, follow the Army Field Manual which repeatedly forbids torture and cruelty, and prohibits a list of specific techniques including water boarding and sleep deprivation?

20. HOWEVER, did President Obama’s Executive Order prohibit “rendition” to countries such as Turkey, Egypt and Pakistan for interrogation, a practice that the Obama Administration NEVER repudiated?

21. Since an Executive Order can be revoked by “the stroke of a pen” did the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016, in essence, codify President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order?

22. Does this finally mean that the U.S. is currently required, if it doesn’t want to send a prisoner to another country under its still-legal “rendition” program, to follow the Army Field Manual -- or has the “stage been set” for a U.S. Supreme Court decision on whether the President’s “Commander in Chief” powers/responsibilities to protect the nation make the National Defense Authorization Act of 2016 unconstitutional?

23. After all, haven’t such towering historical figures as Abraham Lincoln said that “the U.S. Constitution is NOT a suicide pact” when, in President Lincoln’s case, he was SUSPENDING the U.S. Constitution’s Right to Habeas Corpus during the Civil War?