House Dems call for special counsel investigation into torture.
By on Jun 8th, 2008 at 8:24 am
House Dems call for special counsel investigation into torture.
In a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey yesterday, 56 House Democrats “urged the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to examine whether top Bush administration officials may have committed crimes in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists.” The lawmakers, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), “cited what they said is ‘mounting evidence’ that senior officials personally sanctioned the use of waterboarding and other aggressive tactics against detainees in U.S.-run prisons overseas.”
Sort Comments By: Top Rated | Date
42 Responses to “House Dems call for special counsel investigation into torture.”
View Most Popular
Advertisement
What We're About
What We're Fighting For
What We're Fighting Against
Featured
Subscribe to the Progress Report
Topic CloudView topics sorted by popularity
Boehner
Bush
Bush Legacy
Cheney
Civil Rights
Congress
Corporate Ethics
DADT
Economy
Energy
Environment
Ethics
Fox News
Gingrich
Global Warming
Guantanamo
Hannity
Health Care
International Relations
Iran
Iraq
Justice
LGBT
Limbaugh
Liz Cheney
McCain
Media
Military
O'Reilly
Obama
Palin
Pelosi
Race
Radical Right
Religion
Rove
Sanford
Sotomayor
Steele
Supreme Court
Terrorism
ThinkProgress
Tiller
Torture
Women's Rights
Visit Our Affiliated Sites
Reports
In-depth studies on select topics
Got a hot tip?
Have a hot news tip? We'd love to hear from you. Use the form below to send us the latest.
ArchivesBlog Roll
It certainly altruistic to think that The Shrub's boy is going to approve a plan where the boss and his minions face actual prosecution. Impeachment was the answer and that never had the numbers to win
June 8th, 2008 at 8:29 amOhhhh, Another letter. That will really get them.
A definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
June 8th, 2008 at 8:41 amIT'S ABOUT GODDAMN TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THEIR EXIT WALK NEEDS TO BE A "PERP" WALK!!!!!!
June 8th, 2008 at 8:45 amYup, Mukasey will get right on it.
NOT.
June 8th, 2008 at 8:50 amThe only difference between mukasey and gonzales is mukasey is a better liar. He will do absolutely nothing about this letter except reject it. He sold his soul and conscience when he took the job and is now just another tool to hide the crimes of this horrible Administration. He doesn't view his job as serving the public and protecting the Constitution but to serve and protect the worst, most corrupt and criminal Administration in our history.
June 8th, 2008 at 8:57 am7 months, one week, 5 days to go...
Not that the next (Obama) Administration will be perfect or fix all of our problems on Day One, but at least the destruction will end and many things will start moving in a better direction just with the Bush Regime out of the picture.
They should hold off on this until John Edwards is AG, and then, perhaps there just might be justice after all. But, if they do wait, then the American people will say that they are doing nothing. And it can't hurt the Presidential race to have these sort of things out there, as a regular reminder of what McCain actually represents.
June 8th, 2008 at 8:58 amVery doubtful that anything will happen until the new administration takes over, but this and many more things like it are certainly wake up calls that life afterwards won't be pleasant.
June 8th, 2008 at 9:15 am56 votes will not do it and bush/cheney know it. This is a waste of time. While it is appropriate, this mis-administration has not been held accountable by congress and instead has supported when necessary to give bush/cheney what they wanted and symbolically opposed when it wasn't as critical but politically it felt good.
June 8th, 2008 at 9:15 amMukasey:
"Special Counsel? Not right now, OK?
June 8th, 2008 at 9:35 amI'm pretty busy working on Dick and George's severance package... I'll get back to you..."
what a farce. "May have committed crims"?!? Give me a break. If what we "know" right now doesn't convince Congress that the administration committed at least one, if not several hundred, high crimes or misdemeanors, nothing you learn through yet another investigation is giong to do so. Pull the trigger or shut the hell up. Those are Congress' choices at the moment. The American People are quite tired of the charades.
June 8th, 2008 at 9:36 amBeat me to it.
I can see it now, one of Mukasey's aides goes through the mail, and puts this letter from House Democrats into the same pile as the new credit card offers and the circulars from The Home Depot.
June 8th, 2008 at 9:47 amthis investigation should be outsourced to the european human rights commission. there isn't anyone associated with the department of justice or on capitol hill that i would have an ounce of confidence in any investigation they would conduct.
June 8th, 2008 at 9:57 amI remember when it was the USA telling other countries to stop this.
Oh, the good Ole days. (Sheesh!)
June 8th, 2008 at 10:01 amSweet jeebus, I'm so sick of this ineffective posturing. Conyers has turned into a joke.
We get frustrated when they do nothing, and then they write their strongly worded letters -- and it only gets worse.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:07 amlinda Says:
there isn’t anyone associated with the department of justice or on capitol hill that i would have an ounce of confidence in any investigation they would conduct.
56 house democrats agree with you...that's why they want a Special Prosecutor.
Mukasy will never allow it, but it will make some ammunition for the campaign.
What the Republican's should really be worrying about is this:
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/8/32530/31654/843/532075
A one-time top aide to former Oklahoma Rep. Ernest Istook pleaded guilty Monday to a conspiracy to defraud the House as part of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.
John Albaugh admitted in federal court in Washington that he accepted meals and sports and concert tickets, along with other perks, from lobbyists in exchange for official favors
During the eight years Albaugh worked as chief of staff to Istook, the congressman accepted tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Abramoff and his associates.
The Albaugh plea calls into question a central finding of McCain’s Final Report that the only problem was a few bad apples. The truth was that Jack Abramoff was part of a corrupt system of lobbying that is destroying our government. Jack Abramoff was not an aberration, he was normal in the Washington created by the Republican Party.
John McCain should be forced to explain himself and why he placed artificial limits on his Abramoff investigation.
The 742,000 pages of documents being suppressed by John McCain should be released.
Dengre deserves a pulitzer prize for his work on this.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:16 amThey 'urged' the Justice Department.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:18 amL . O . effing L
When their system is set up so that their positions are above the law, criminals naturally take their positions.
Seems pretty obvious to me.
In a letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey yesterday, 56 House Democrats “urged the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to examine whether top Bush administration officials may have committed crimes in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists.”
Just add this to the growing list of things Mukasey needs to, but won't do. If the Democrat Pelosi won't do her job what are the chances that a Republican minion will do his?
http://progressiveworldreview.com
June 8th, 2008 at 10:25 amThere's no time line on justice. Everyone knows the Justice Dept. won't act on these now. But there time is short. There will be justice.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:29 amTime limit. not time line. d'ooooh.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:30 amTheRight:
June 8th, 2008 at 10:35 amTo what do you attribute high gasoline prices?
10,000,000?
"The National Average for a gallon of gas hit $4.00 this morning. The poor and senior citizens are suffering."
June 8th, 2008 at 10:37 amThis is a direct result of the policies, foreign and domestic, of the TheRight
The National Average for a gallon of gas hit $4.00 this morning. The poor and senior citizens are suffering.
Like you guys give two hoots about the poor and seniors. Dry those croc tears, you ain't fooling anyone.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:45 amTheRight in the interest of the suffering of the poor and seniors, I invite you to join in the movement toward an improved healthcare system which will provide affordable quality care and coverage for all. I know I am happy to chip in on behalf of others and I sense the deep concerns you have for those whom have less and struggle.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:48 amI like how TheTroll derides Democratic ineffectiveness in their investigations (which is true) but states that these multiple investigations are "useless". They're not useless, although they fall far short of what they should achieve.
If nothing else, they keep the focus on the criminal activity of BushCo, which makes it easier to tie Grampy McSame to a corrupt as well as a failed administration and all but assure an Obama administration come '09.
TheTroll has also implied, several times, that the Democratic leadership in Congress is responsible for rising gas prices, although it has never made clear HOW they are responsible. Am I expecting too much from a particularly dense troll?
I think that's likely.
June 8th, 2008 at 10:49 amAlways one step ahead of me ralph. I was just about to invite TheRight to move up one and share with us their "informed" comments as to how the democrats are responsibly for the nation's failed energy policies. BTW: is it okay to just use ralph. In general I only like to address individuals by their given names but I am also a poor keyboardist
June 8th, 2008 at 10:53 amdbadass: "ralph" is fine. I find myself struggling sometimes with the same issue. For example, I often want to call joe cantwell just "joe". But it's tricky since login IDs are not necessarily proper names. Still, I like the easy familiarity of "ralph".
June 8th, 2008 at 11:00 amBush,Cheney,C.Rice,Wolfowitz,and Rumsfeld :
June 8th, 2008 at 11:00 am" We don't use torture,we only use 'enhanced techniques'" !!
Yeah, and Mucky will appoint a special counsel, sure.
June 8th, 2008 at 11:09 amMaybe Donald Duck. He's special.
Don't forget to pick up your paycheck and run your errands, dems.
June 8th, 2008 at 11:09 amThompney, you make a poor jester but that is just my opinion.
June 8th, 2008 at 11:32 amHopefully a President Obama and a Dem Congress can enact some reforms to allow more Congressional oversight of the Justice Department should this kind of ethical conflict ever occur again. I know that breaks down the wall between Separation of Powers, but we can never again have an Executive Branch able to block the necessary investigations that lead up to a possible impeachment.
June 8th, 2008 at 11:32 amYeah, dbadass, that last Thompney bit was kinda lame. But he shows promise as a troll parodist.
June 8th, 2008 at 11:34 amLet's play "What if?"...http://www.tagg-theangrygayguy.com
June 8th, 2008 at 11:34 amNo hurry....
June 8th, 2008 at 11:57 amTheTroll must not have any defense of BushCo's torture policy, because he launched into some weird attack on the Canadian health care system.
Bizarre.
June 8th, 2008 at 12:02 pmIn the event a special counsel is appointed (and I seriously doubt that there will be), my senator will have some serious 'splainin' to do about his role in the Bush Administration's use of torture.
Jay Rockefeller is the only reason I'm not voting straight ticket Dem this year because I am ashamed to say that he's from my state. But his not standing up and doing the right thing about torture isn't the only problem I've got with the Chairman of the Senate Select Defense Intelligence Oversight Committee.
That one exception was not Sen. Rockefeller.
His failure to stand up then was even worse than the lack of judgment he showed when he scrawled that little letter to cover his own political backside over Bush's wiretaps in 2003, sticking it in his desk instead of actually directly telling them that it was the wrong thing to do. And instead of at least raising a stink about it in the Senate beck then (perhaps behind closed doors) as the Chairman of the oversight panel, he now wishes to grant retroactive immunity to companies who knew damned good and well that what they were doing was illegal!
By the way, Larry Franklin, the former Bush administration official who is in jail for spying is also from West Virginia making Senator Rockefeller his congressional representative. I seriously doubt that Bush's "justice" department ever offered Mr. Franklin a lighter sentence for more information about possible complicity by other members of the Bush administration. But given its history of covering the Bush administration's glaring problems, is it any wonder that Sen. Rockefeller never used his position and rank on the Defense Intel Oversight panel to see why Mr. Franklin never produced any collaborators?
Then, of course there's his committee's total lack of oversight regarding the Bush administration officials "outing" of Valerie Plame. Hadley, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Addington, Feith, Rice, Rove, Libby - none have ever been held accountable for their complicity in the loss of CIA covert agent. Nor have they issued any public report of what the loss of her assets cost the US intelligence community, or even any recommendations of how to prevent it from happening again.
Finally, his statement in the press regarding the Senate Intelligence Committee's Final Phase II Reports on Prewar Iraq Intelligence reveal exactly what he believes his role to be when he concluded:
Senator Jay Rockefeller is my Congressman. He was the only Democratic congressman from West Virginia to vote for letting Bush have the keys to the world's most powerful war machine, even voting over the vehement opposition of Senator Byrd, his senior, on the floor of the Senate. He was on the Senate defense intel oversight committee at the time.
It should also be noted that Sen. Rockefeller was also on the Senate Select Defense Intelligent Oversight Committee on 9/11/01, and even when the 911 commission issued its scathing report (p420):
Did Hadley and Wolfowitz forgot to read that to Rockefeller and his vaunted "oversight" panel as well?
June 8th, 2008 at 12:35 pmhttp://www.humanrights-geneva.info/US-quits-Human-Rights-Council,3184
US quits Human Rights Council
Not only does the law not matter to this administration, neither does human Rights.
Torture IS the law to these scum!
.
June 8th, 2008 at 1:21 pmYet I haven't met a Canadian woman who had her child anywhere but a hospital. What gives?
June 8th, 2008 at 2:25 pmWhy is that 'pukes use examples of other countries to argue against anything this country needs? Don't they have the confidence in the USA to believe we can do it better than any other nation on earth? I think they actually encourage American failure by doing this.
June 8th, 2008 at 3:43 pmoops. I used the b word to mean complain. House of Roberts' point is well made. I just lack the energy to retype my entry
June 8th, 2008 at 5:05 pmYou might try using sound facts and logic sometime. We progressives generally respond to that, but those elements are seldom to be found in an argument from a regressive like yourself.
June 8th, 2008 at 7:00 pmWhere is the WAR CRIMINAL, Rice? She is lying low trying to avoid accountability! RiceMustGo.com !!!! Rice, you are a LIER and a WAR CRIMINAL!
June 8th, 2008 at 8:25 pm