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Ashcroft stands by conclusions of torture memos |
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By Susan Crabtree
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Posted: 07/17/08 02:40 PM [ET] |
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Former Attorney General John Ashcroft on Thursday defended the conclusions of two Justice Department memos outlining the use of tough interrogation tactics on detainees, although he said he disagreed with the legal reasoning used in them. In testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, Ashcroft acknowledged that the first legal opinion, eventually withdrawn and rewritten, contained faulty analysis. After the memos were criticized by Justice officials, “it was not a hard decision” to withdraw them, he said.
Ashcroft, who served as attorney general from 2001 to 2005, said he believed that the Bush administration has not committed acts of torture in its interrogations of detainees and that it should be commended for avoiding another terrorist attack.
“I don’t know of any acts of torture that have been committed,” Ashcroft said. “I would attribute the absence of an attack to the excellent work and the dedication of those whose lives are committed to protecting the country.”
Several Democrats, including Rep. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), Maxine Waters (Calif.) and Robert Wexler (Fla.), asked Ashcroft about the practice of waterboarding and whether the interrogation method was used before the early legal memos were rescinded.
Ashcroft said he knew of three times in which the method was used, but could not recall the first time. He also maintained that waterboarding, as it was then described by the CIA, does not amount to torture.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently refused to say whether waterboarding is currently legal because it is no longer used by CIA interrogators. CIA Director Michael Hayden barred waterboarding in 2006.
The memos on interrogation techniques were written in part by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, whom The Washington Post reported Ashcroft refused to promote to head Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2003. President Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card Jr., was pushing Yoo for the job at the time. A deputy at the office, Yoo had worked closely with then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and vice presidential adviser David Addington on the detainee interrogation memos.
Bush stepped in and agreed to the compromise appointment of Jack Goldsmith, a Defense Department lawyer who was on leave from the University of Chicago Law School. Goldsmith later wrote a deeply critical book, The Terror Presidency, in which he described early interrogation memos as “deeply flawed: sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the president.”
During Thursday’s testimony, Ashcroft refused to comment about that standoff with the White House, as well as several other conflicts he had with the president, the vice president and other administration officials over the use of torture on terrorism suspects.
“My communications with the president are privileged communications and it would be unlawful for me to comment,” he said repeatedly.
He also said little about a widely reported confrontation he had with Gonzales and Card when they came to his hospital bed to try to persuade him to reauthorize Bush’s domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal. Ashcroft refused to sign off on it.
While he refused to recount exactly what happened during the sickbed visit, he did say he had spent the previous week in intensive care without food or drink.
“So I was thirsty and hungry so I might have been grouchy,” he recalled.
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