Jorge Escalante, La Nacion (Santiago, Chile), 30 January 2009

El general Carlos Prats y su esposa Sofía Cuthbert, el día de su matrimonio el 19 de enero de 1944 en Iquique.

Emocionados, los familiares del ex comandante en jefe general Carlos Prats y su esposa, Sofía Cuthbert, recibieron el fallo que dictó la Novena Sala. Ahora esperan que la Sala Penal de la Corte Suprema no rebaje las penas a los nueve sentenciados.
Por primera vez en un fallo judicial, la DINA fue calificada como una “organización de carácter terrorista”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ali Frick, Think Progress, Jan. 29, 2009

John Yoo, infamous author of the Bush administration legal memos authorizing the use of torture on suspected terrorists, slams President Obama for banning torture in a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, gravely warning that Obama “may have opened the door to further terrorist acts on U.S. soil.”

Throughout the article, Yoo insists that torture is America’s most effective weapon against terrorists and warns that without it, the U.S. will be incapable of intelligence-gathering:

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists. Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial. […]

Relying on the civilian justice system not only robs us of the most effective intelligence tool to avert future attacks, it provides an opportunity for our enemies to obtain intelligence on us.

Read the rest of this entry »

 John Yoo, Wall Street Journal Opinion Page, January 29, 2009

The president will soon realize that governing involves hard choices.

During his first week as commander in chief, President Barack Obama ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay and terminated the CIA’s special authority to interrogate terrorists.

AP

While these actions will certainly please his base — gone are the cries of an “imperial presidency” — they will also seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks. In issuing these executive orders, Mr. Obama is returning America to the failed law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism that prevailed before Sept. 11, 2001. He’s also drying up the most valuable sources of intelligence on al Qaeda, which, according to CIA Director Michael Hayden, has come largely out of the tough interrogation of high-level operatives during the early years of the war.

The question Mr. Obama should have asked right after the inaugural parade was: What will happen after we capture the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abu Zubaydah? Instead, he took action without a meeting of his full national security staff, and without a legal review of all the policy options available to meet the threats facing our country.

Read the rest of this entry »

Satyam Khanna on Jan 26th, 2009 at 5:30 pm( ThinkProgress.org )

Last week, former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen penned a vitriolic op-ed in the Washington Post, arguing that if there is another terror attack, “Americans will hold Obama responsible.” Greg Sargent noted that on the same day, Thiessen called President Obama “the most dangerous man ever to occupy the Oval Office.”

Today, in an interview on WAMU’s Diane Rehm Show, Thiessen again lashed out at Obama, this time for Obama’s executive order closing Guantanamo. “I think this is the most dangerous decision that any president has made within 48 hours of his inauguration,” he said, saying that torture is “singularly responsible” for stopping attacks on the U.S. Thiessen listed a long chain of events that were all allegedly sourced to the torture of Abu Zubaydah:

THIESSEN: The CIA developed these alternative interrogation techniques, and all of a sudden he started talking. Zubaydah’s information led us to Ramsey bin al Shibh, who was was one of the 9/11 hijackers. Together, they gave us the information that led the capture of KSM. Then, KSM gave us information about another al Qaeda operative, Majid Khan, who was in CIA custody. He told us that Majid Khan had been tasked to give $50,000 to an operative named Zubair, who was developing plots with a Southeast Asian group called JI.

Later, Thiessen bristled in response to a conversation about investigating Bush administration officials for torture. Bush’s torturers, he said, are really “American heroes”:

THIESSEN: They’re not torturers. They’re heroes. … And the thought that we’re sitting here discussing whether these people should be prosecuted or investigated is just outrageous. These people are American heroes who saved lives and stopped the next Sept. 11.

Listen here:

Zubaydah’s torture is a textbook example of why coercive interrogations do not work. Zubaydah was reportedly driven mentally insane from his torture, and Canadians tossed out evidence from the CIA’s interrogations of Zubaydah. In fact, from Zubaydah’s interrogations, the U.S. gleaned false information about links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

In calling Bush’s torturers “heroes,” Thiessen is echoing Bill Kristol, who suggested in November that the “CIA agents who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammad” receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.