Blogs

CIA Torture Advocate John Rizzo Says Obama Must Deal With Interrogation Program ‘Immediately’
Matt Corley
thinkprogress.org
Nov 7th, 2008

At the American Bar Association’s conference on national security yesterday, CIA senior deputy general counsel John Rizzo recommended that President-elect Barack Obama “address immediately detainee issues at Guantanamo Bay and in the CIA’s interrogation program.” Rizzo said that the agency’s interrogation and detainee program needs “urgent” attention:

The CIA detention and interrogation program, he said, is just as urgent. “That’s going to have to be dealt with immediately,” Rizzo said. “We do not have the luxury to wait and muddle through.” He knows how tough the issue is–his involvement in helping the CIA construct the program earned him opposition in Congress that killed his nomination to be the CIA’s general counsel.

The Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman did not report whether Rizzo said anything specific about how the program needs to be “dealt” with. This information would be important since, as Gorman notes, Rizzo controversially helped construct the program that pushed the boundaries of torture.

In 2002, while serving as an acting general counsel, Rizzo approved of a memo drafted by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that stretched the definition of torture in order to make it permissible for use in the course of an interrogation. Asked at a June 2007 confirmation hearing if he “should have objected at the time” to Bybee’s definition of torture, Rizzo replied, “I can’t say I should have objected at the time.” Watch it:

Rizzo’s nomination was withdrawn by the White House in Sept. 2007 after key senators and human rights and advocacy groups protested his stubborn “>refusal to renounce his role in crafting the Bush administration’s torture policies.

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/11/07/rizzo-obama-interrogation/

Please help us to urge Mr Obama to pay immediate attention to Remote Mind Control Abuse and Torture; urge his to investe and expose such terrible crime immediately.