{"id":12127,"date":"2018-05-01T11:51:27","date_gmt":"2018-05-01T15:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=12127"},"modified":"2018-05-01T12:50:58","modified_gmt":"2018-05-01T16:50:58","slug":"james-comeys-forgotten-rescue-of-bush-era-torture-regime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/01\/james-comeys-forgotten-rescue-of-bush-era-torture-regime\/","title":{"rendered":"James Comey’s Forgotten Rescue of Bush-Era Torture Regime"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"\"<\/a>Mises Institute, May 1, 2018\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

James Comey’s Forgotten Rescue of Bush-Era Torture<\/a><\/h3>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

In Washington, writing emails is \u201cclose enough for government work\u201d to convey sainthood.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cHere I stand, I can do no other,\u201d James Comey told President George W. Bush<\/a> in 2004 when Bush pressured Comey – who was then Deputy Attorney General – to approve an unlawful antiterrorist policy.\u00a0Comey, who was FBI chief from 2013 to 2017, was quoting a line reputedly uttered by Martin Luther in 1521, when he told Holy Roman Emperor Charles V that he would not recan<\/a>t his sweeping criticisms of the Catholic Church. Comey\u2019s quotation of himself quoting the father of the Reformation is par for the self-reverence of his new memoir, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership<\/em>.<\/p>\n

MSNBC host Chris Matthews recently<\/a> declared, \u201cJames Comey made his bones by standing up against torture. He was a made man before Trump came along.\u201d\u00a0Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria<\/a>, in a column declaring that Americans should be \u201cdeeply grateful\u201d to lawyers like Comey, declared, \u201cThe Bush administration wanted to claim that its \u2018enhanced interrogation techniques\u2019 were lawful. Comey believed they were not… So Comey pushed back as much as he could.\u201d<\/p>\n

Martin Luther risked death to fight against what he considered the heresies of his time. Comey, a top Bush administration policymaker, found a safer way to oppose the worldwide secret U.S. torture regime widely considered a heresy against American values.\u00a0Comey approved brutal practices<\/a> and then wrote some memos and emails fretting about the optics.<\/p>\n

Comey became Deputy Attorney General in late 2003 and \u201chad oversight of the legal justification used to authorize<\/a>\u201d key Bush programs in the war on terror. At that time, the Bush White House was pushing the Justice Department to again sign off on an array of extreme practices that had begun shortly after the 9\/11 attacks. A 2002 Justice Department memo had leaked out that declared that the president was entitled to ignore federal law in approving extreme interrogation techniques.<\/a>\u00a0Photos had also leaked from Abu Ghraib prison<\/a> showing the stacking of naked prisoners with bags over their heads, mock electrocution via a wire connected to a man\u2019s penis, guard dogs on the verge of ripping into naked men, and grinning U.S. male and female soldiers celebrating the bloody degradation. A confidential CIA Inspector General report had just warned that post-9\/11 CIA interrogation methods may violate the international Convention Against Torture<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Rather than ending the abuses, Comey repudiated the memo. Speaking to the media in a not-for-attribution session on June 22, 2004, Comey declared that the 2002 memo was “overbroad,” “abstract academic theory,” and \u201clegally unnecessary<\/a>.” Comey helped oversee crafting a new memo with different legal footing to justify the same interrogation methods.<\/p>\n

Comey twice gave explicit approval for waterboardin<\/a>g, which sought to break detainees with near-drowning. This practice had been recognized as a war crime by the U.S. government since the Spanish American War<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Comey wrote in his memoir that he was losing sleep<\/a> over concern about Bush administration torture polices. But losing sleep was not an option for detainees because Comey approved sleep deprivation as an interrogation technique<\/a>. Detainees could be forcibly kept awake for up to 180 hours until they confessed their sins. How did this work? At Abu Ghraib, the notorious Iraqi prison, one FBI agent reported seeing a detainee \u201chandcuffed to a railing with a nylon sack on his head and a shower curtain draped around him, being slapped by a soldier to keep him awake<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Comey also approved \u201cwall slamming\u201d \u2013<\/a> which, as law professor David Cole wrote, meant that detainees could be thrown against a wall up to 30 times<\/a>. Comey also signed off on the CIA using \u201cinterrogation\u201d methods such as\u00a0facial slaps,<\/a> locking detainees in small boxes for 18 hours, and forced nudity.\u00a0When the secret Comey memo approving those methods finally became public in 2009<\/a>, many Americans were aghast – and relieved that the Obama administration had repudiated Bush policies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When it came to opposing torture, Comey\u2019s version of \u201cHere I stand\u201d had more loopholes than a reverse mortgage contract. Though Comey in 2005 approved each of 13 controversial extreme interrogation methods<\/a>, he objected to combining multiple methods on one detainee. It was as if Martin Luther grudgingly approved of the Catholic Church selling indulgences to individually expunge<\/a> sins for adultery, robbery, lying, and gluttony but vehemently objected if all the sins were expunged in one lump sum payment.<\/p>\n

In 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee finally released a massive report, Americans learned grisly details of the CIA torture regime that Comey helped legally sanctify – including death via hypothermia, rape-like rectal feeding of detainees, compelling detainees to stand long periods on broken legs, and dozens of cases<\/a> of innocent people pointlessly brutalized. Psychologists aided the torture regime, offering hints on how to destroy the will and resistance of prisoners.\u00a0The only CIA official to go to prison for the torture scandal was courageous whistleblower John Kiriakou.<\/p>\n

If Comey had resigned in 2004 or 2005 to protest the torture techniques he now claims to abhor, he would deserve some of the praise he is now receiving. Instead, he remained in the Bush administration but wrote an email summarizing his objections, declaring that \u201cit was my job to protect the department and the A.G. [Attorney General] and that I could not agree to this because it was wrong.\u201d<\/a> A 2009 New York Times<\/em> analysis noted that Comey and two colleagues \u201chave largely escaped criticism [for approving torture] because they raised questions about interrogation<\/a> and the law.\u201d In Washington, writing emails is \u201cclose enough for government work\u201d to convey sainthood.<\/p>\n

When Comey finally exited the Justice Department in August 2005 to become a lavishly-paid senior vice president for Lockheed Martin<\/a>, he proclaimed in a farewell speech that protecting the Justice Department\u2019s \u201creservoir\u201d of \u201ctrust and credibility\u201d requires \u201cvigilance\u201d and \u201can unerring commitment to truth<\/a>.\u201d But Comey perpetuated policies that shattered the moral credibility of both the Justice Department and the U.S. government. Comey failed to heed another Martin Luther admonition: \u201cYou are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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James Bovard is the author of ten books, including 2012\u2019s Public Policy Hooligan<\/em>, and 2006\u2019s Attention Deficit Democracy<\/em>. He has written for the New York Times<\/em>, Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Playboy<\/em>, Washington Post<\/em>, and many other publications.<\/p>\n

*Thanks to Pixabay<\/a> and craigclark<\/a> for the torture image I added to the Comey official portrait<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mises Institute, May 1, 2018 James Comey’s Forgotten Rescue of Bush-Era Torture by James Bovard In Washington, writing emails is \u201cclose enough for government work\u201d to convey sainthood. \u201cHere I stand, I can do no other,\u201d James Comey told President George W. Bush in 2004 when Bush pressured Comey – who was then Deputy Attorney […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1465,347,1467,1464,1466,47,1469,137,1468,1462,1073,1463,1470,12,972,1172],"class_list":["post-12127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-chris-matthews","tag-cia","tag-david-cole","tag-enhanced-interrogation","tag-fareed-zakaria","tag-fbi","tag-forced-nudity","tag-george-w-bush","tag-hypothermia","tag-james","tag-james-comey","tag-martin-luther","tag-sainthood","tag-torture","tag-trust","tag-waterboarding"],"yoast_head":"\nJames Comey's Forgotten Rescue of Bush-Era Torture Regime - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As George W. 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \"the roving inspector general of the modern state\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \"one-man truth squad.\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com","https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","https:\/\/x.com\/jimbovard"],"url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/author\/admin\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12127"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12131,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12127\/revisions\/12131"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}