RM: Did Gonzales Approve Torture?

[L. Coyote]

Run time: 07:02 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHXxKz8mafQ   Posted on YouTube: May 24, 2009 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: May 24, 2009 By DU Member: L. Coyote Views on DU: 696

 
Rachel Maddow: 05-21-09 Before he was Attorney General, did White House/Bush counsel Alberto Gonzales sign off on torture?

[L. Coyote]

1. Bradford Berenson, Sidley Austin Partner, former WH attorney, Bush criminals defender

Bradford Berenson, associate counsel under Gonzales at White House.

Barack Obama (later a Sidley Austin intern) at Bradford Berenson’s apartment,
where he watched the 1990 election returns.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x5259930

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Ralston's attorney: Bradford Berenson, associate counsel under Gonzales at White House
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3022643#3022954

Bradford A. Berenson is one of the original eight associate counsels during Alberto Gonzales's tenure as White House counsel.

Bradford Berenson Returns to Sidley Austin Brown & Wood After Two Years as Associate Counsel to the President
http://www.sidley.com/news/pub.asp?PubID=17153282003

Represented Executive on Issues from Homeland Security to the USA Patriot Act

.... associate White House counsel under President George W. Bush, ... appointed by the president in January 2001 ... Berenson’s responsibilities included work on judicial selection, executive privilege, and responses to congressional oversight efforts. .... He worked on the USA Patriot Act, the military order authorizing the use of military commissions, detainee policy and anti-terrorism litigation, presidential action against terrorist financing, and the restructuring of the federal government to create a new Department of Homeland Security.

Mr. Berenson ... previously worked on the defense of complex white collar criminal matters... defended criminal cases at every stage of development, from corporate internal investigations and grand jury proceedings through trials, sentencings, and appeals, in areas as diverse as government contracts, environmental crime, health care, and public corruption ...

Berenson ... clerked for... Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Peter Keisler, Rove, Abramoff, DoJ, the USAs, Bradford Berenson, and Sidley & Austin

I'm no longer surprised when I encounter new Culture of Corruption links. It is one big Family, or perhaps "the Enterprise" is a better term.

Peter Keisler, who recently resigned along with Gonzales, represented ATT in a case while a partner in Sidley & Austin, before being hired by DoJ.
I recognize the law firm name because Bradford Berenson, another Sidley & Austin partner, represents other resignees in the Bush administration, Kyle Sampson and Susan B. Ralston, aide Rove and Abramoff and former White House political director..

Berenson, like Keisler, is also a former SCOTUS clerk, was a Bush WH deputy counsel, was involved in the Florida recount, and defends NSA spying and presidential power.

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http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1839232#1842290

Administration officials refused Friday to discuss the National Security Agency spying program or even to confirm its existence.

Some former officials say it is important to put the program into the context of the time. "I wasn't aware of this when I was at the White House, but there was a tremendous sense of urgency to take whatever steps were necessary to detect and disrupt any cells that were out there," said Bradford A. Berenson

... Berenson, the former White House associate counsel, said that in rare cases, the presidents' advisers may decide that an existing law violates the Constitution "by invading the president's executive powers as commander in chief." ........

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WilliamPitt = Who should be going to jail for torture?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5525548#5525748

Supersedeas .... you might want to consider William Haynes, Eliana Davidson, Daniel Dell'Orto and Bradford Berenson

Key to the development of the Torture Program was the bootstrap initiated by the WH Counsel's office of AVOIDING Geneva. See p. 2 FN 10 of the Senate Report. So much of what followed was development out of developing a legal work-around to avoid Geneva (now we know with CERTAINTY the workaround was UNCONSTITUTIONAL - see Hamdan v. Rumsfield).

Bradford Berenson was also party of that the UNCONSTITUTIONAL effort. Consider this:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/interviews/berenson.html

[L. Coyote]

2. FRONTLINE. The Torture Question. = Watch the Program here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/view/

.... a FRONTLINE documentary crew made the perilous journey to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. ...


Former White House and Justice Department legal advisers who were involved
in drafting many of the administration's boldest proposals agreed to talk ...

"There was a powerful set of shared assumptions we had in the wake of 9/11, and one of the most powerful was the assumption that we would never be forgiven if we failed to do something that was within the power of our government lawfully to protect the public from a further attack," says Associate White House Counsel Bradford Berenson.

[Piewhacket]

3. So we have the WHO, WHAT,WHEN, WHERE, WHY. Now Prosecute!

Somebody arrest "James Mitchell".

[L. Coyote]

4. The CIA's torture teachers

The CIA's torture teachers
Psychologists helped the CIA exploit a secret military program to develop brutal interrogation tactics -- likely with the approval of the Bush White House.
Mark Benjamin - Jun. 21, 2007 - http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/21/cia_sere/print.html


There is growing evidence of high-level coordination between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military in developing abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects. After the Sept. 11 attacks, both turned to a small cadre of psychologists linked to the military's secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program to "reverse-engineer" techniques originally designed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if captured, by exposing them to brutal treatment. The military's use of SERE training for interrogations in the war on terror was revealed in detail in a recently declassified report. But the CIA's use of such tactics -- working in close coordination with the military -- until now has remained largely unknown.

According to congressional sources and mental healthcare professionals knowledgeable about the secret program who spoke with Salon, two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were at the center of the program, which likely violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. The two are currently under investigation: Salon has learned that Daniel Dell'Orto, the principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Defense, sent a "document preservation" order on May 15 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top Pentagon officials forbidding the destruction of any document mentioning Mitchell and Jessen or their psychological consulting firm, Mitchell, Jessen and Associates, based in Spokane, Wash. Dell'Orto's order was in response to a May 1 request from Sen. Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who is investigating the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody.

Mitchell and Jessen have worked as contractors for the CIA since 9/11. Both were previously affiliated with the military's SERE program, which at its main school at Fort Bragg puts elite special operations forces through brutal mock interrogations, from sensory deprivation to simulated drowning.

A previously classified report by the Defense Department's inspector general, made public last month, revealed .................