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Former vice president says CIA did what needed to be done

On the heels of the Senate Intelligence Committee's blistering report on the CIA's brutal handling of prisoners after 9/11, the New York Times is calling for a criminal investigation of former Vice President Dick Cheney and other members of the Bush administration for conspiring to commit torture and other crimes prohibited by federal and international laws.

"Americans have known about many of these acts for years," the Times editorial board stated on Monday. "But the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality."

In a recent appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," Cheney refused to call some of the tactics, including involuntary rectal feeding, torture.

“We were very careful to stop short of torture,” Cheney said. "We worked hard to stay short of that definition."

In its editorial, the Times said the "sadistic" techniques outlined in the committee's report "are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which defines torture as the intentional infliction of 'severe physical or mental pain or suffering.' They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture."

"It is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these acts anything but torture, which they clearly were," the Times continued. "As the report reveals, these claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what they intended to do was illegal."

GOP heavyweights McCain, Cheney find opposing view …Play video

The paper criticized President Barack Obama for failing "to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects":

No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal investigation.

The Times' editorial board is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate Cheney; David Addington, Cheney's former chief of staff; former CIA Director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the lawyers "who drafted what became known as the torture memos"; Jose Rodriguez Jr., the CIA official "who ordered the destruction of the videotapes"; psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and any CIA employees who carried it out.

But the paper doubts Obama has "the political courage to order a new investigation," much less "a criminal probe of the actions of a former president."

When asked on "Meet The Press" if he was bothered by the fact that 25 percent of the detainees turned out to be innocent, Cheney was unapologetic.

"I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective ... to get the guys who did 9/11, and it is to avoid another attack against the United States," Cheney said. "We've avoided another mass casualty attack against the United States. And we did capture Bin Laden. We did capture an awful lot of the senior guys at al-Qaida who were responsible for that attack on 9/11. I'd do it again in a minute."

A majority of Americans seem to agree.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released last week found that 51 percent of Americans believed the harsh interrogation tactics detailed in the committee's report were warranted, while 28 percent said they went too far.

The results virtually matched a Pew Research Center poll that also found 51 percent believe the CIA's methods were justified, while 29 percent said they were not. AWashington Post-ABC News poll released last week found that 59 percent approved of the CIA's tactics, while 31 percent disapproved.

Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.

Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.

Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-pageexecutive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”

These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which definestorture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture.

So it is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these acts anything but torture, which they clearly were. As the report reveals, these claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what they intended to do was illegal.

In July 2002, C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency needed to use “more aggressive methods” of interrogation that would “otherwise be prohibited by the torture statute.” They asked the department to promise not to prosecute those who used these methods. When the department refused, they shopped around for the answer they wanted. They got it from the ideologically driven lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a legal foundation for the methods. Government officials now rely on the memos as proof that they sought and received legal clearance for their actions. But the report changes the game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good faith.

No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal investigation.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch are to give Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. a letter Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate what appears increasingly to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under color of law, to commit torture and other serious crimes.”

The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.

But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.

One would expect Republicans who have gone hoarse braying about Mr. Obama’s executive overreach to be the first to demand accountability, but with one notable exception, Senator John McCain, they have either fallen silent or actively defendedthe indefensible. They cannot even point to any results: Contrary to repeated claims by the C.I.A., the report concluded that “at no time” did any of these techniques yield intelligence that averted a terror attack. And at least 26 detainees were later determined to have been “wrongfully held.”

Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke torture by other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.

Meet The New York Times’s Editorial Board »

A version of this editorial appears in print on December 22, 2014, on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

BEIRUT (AP) — The gunmen came to the all-girls' elementary school in the Iraqi city of Fallujah at midday with a special delivery: piles of long black robes with gloves and face veils, now required dress code for females in areas ruled by the Islamic State group.

"These are the winter version. Make sure every student gets one," one of the men told a supervisor at the school earlier this month.

Extremists are working to excise women from public life across the territory controlled by the Islamic State group, stretching hundreds of kilometers (miles) from the outskirts of the Syrian city of Aleppo in the west to the edges of the Iraqi capital in the east.

The group has been most notorious for its atrocities, including the horrors it inflicted on women and girls from Iraq's minority Yazidi community when its fighters overran their towns this year. Hundreds of Yazidi women and girls were abducted and given to extremists as slaves. A report by Amnesty International released Tuesday said the captives — including girls as young as 10-12 — endured torture, rape and sexual slavery, and that several abducted girls committed suicide.

In day-to-day life, the group has also dramatically hemmed in women's lives across the Sunni Muslim heartland that makes up the bulk of Islamic State group territory, activists and residents say. Their movements are restricted and their opportunity for work has shrunk.

In Iraq's Mosul, the biggest city in the group's self-declared caliphate, "life for women has taken a 180-degree turn," said Hanaa Edwer, a prominent Iraqi human rights activist. "They are forbidding them from learning, forbidding them from moving around freely. The appearance of a woman is being forcefully altered."

At least eight women have been stoned to death for alleged adultery in IS-controlled areas in northern Syria, activists say.

At least 10 women in Mosul have been killed for speaking out against the group, Edwer said. In August, IS detained and beheaded a female dentist in Deir el-Zour who had continued to treat patients of both sexes, the U.N. said.

Relatives of women considered improperly dressed or found in the company of males who are not relatives are lashed or imprisoned. In the IS-controlled town of al-Bab in Syria's northern Aleppo province, an activist described seeing armed militants walking with a stick in hand, gently whacking or jabbing at women deemed inappropriately dressed.

"Sometimes they follow the woman home and detain her father, or they confiscate her ID and tell her to come back with her father to pick it up," said Bari Abdelatif, now based in Turkey.

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In this undated file image posted on Monday, June 30, 2014, by the Raqqa Media Center of the Islamic …

Enforcement varies from one place to the other, much of it depending on the whims of the Hisba, or vice police enforcing those rules. Most of the areas taken over by IS were already deeply conservative places where women had a subordinate role in society, but the extremists have sharply exacerbated the restrictions.

Abdelatif said women in al-Bab are harassed for venturing outside their home without a "mahram," or male guardian. In the Syrian city of Raqqa, the militants' de facto capital, activists said women were allowed to leave their homes on their own, but needed a male companion or permission of a male relative to leave the city.

An IS all-female brigade, called al-Khansa, patrols the streets in some areas to enforce clothing restrictions.

Across the territory, women now have to wear the "khimar," a tent-like robe that covers the head, shoulders and chest. The khimar leaves the face exposed but very often the militants go ahead and force women to put a niqab veil over their faces as well, leaving only the eyes visible.

In the Iraqi city of Fallujah, an elementary school teacher said militants recently dropped by the school to deliver the niqab, robes and gloves for the students to wear.

"I used to wear make-up on occasion but I don't anymore," she said, speaking by phone on strict condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

The militants have segregated schools and changed the curriculum. In some cases they shut schools down, summoning teachers to take a course in their hard-line version of Islamic Shariah law before reopening them. In many instances in both Iraq and Syria, parents have opted not to send their children to school to avoid IS brainwashing them.

Hospitals have also been segregated. A woman has to be seen by a female doctor, but there are very few women doctors left.

Early marriage is on the rise because parents want to find husbands for their daughters quickly for fear they will be forced to marry Islamic State fighters, according to the U.N.

"The psychological and physical harm caused by ISIS's treatment of women, the onerous instructions imposed on their dress code, and restrictions on their freedom of movement demonstrate discriminatory treatment on the basis of gender," a United Nations panel investigating war crimes in the Syrian conflict said last month.

It said the killings and acts of sexual violence perpetrated by IS constitute crimes against humanity.

While the Islamic State group imposes its extremist vision of Islamic law on Sunni Muslim women under its rule, it went further when it overran the Iraqi villages of the Yazidi minority in early August. The extremists consider followers of the Yazidi faith as infidels — and thus permissible to enslave.

Amnesty International interviewed more than 40 former captives who escaped the militants and described being abducted, raped and being "sold" or given as "gifts" to Islamic State fighters or supporters.

One girl told how a 19-year-old among them named Jilan committed suicide, fearing rape.

In the bathroom, "she cut her wrists and hanged herself. She was very beautiful," the girl quoted in the report said. "I think she knew she was going to be taken away by a man."

___

Associated Press writer Vivian Salama contributed to this report from Baghdad.

Cuba says it's open to every element of President Obama's move to improve relations

HAVANA (AP) -- Cuba is open to all of U.S. President Barack Obama's moves to improve relations and strengthen private enterprise and civil society on the island, the country's head of North American affairs said Monday.

In Cuba's first detailed public response to Obama's historic announcement last week, Josefina Vidal told The Associated Press that Cuba welcomes "the entire package" offered by Obama. That includes U.S. equipment to improve the Cuban internet and U.S. exports to Cuba's new class of private business owners.

"Our president has said we welcome President Obama's decision to introduce the most significant changes in relations with Cuba in 54 years," Josefina Vidal said Monday. "That includes the entire package."

Cuba has historically imposed heavy regulations on the internet and private business as it has blamed the U.S. embargo for many of the problems of the island's stagnant economy.

Vidal said that the U.S. has been to blame for Cuba's economic problems, which include crumbling infrastructure, low levels of foreign investment and rates of internet access that are among the lowest in the world, and the opening is an opportunity to show what the country could do unshackled.

"Look back. When have you seen a negative response to the American government removing any type of restriction?" Vidal said. "What we say is, get rid of the excuse and put us to the test!

"We don't have any reason to reject anything that comes from the United States that's positive, and that are measures taken to loosen the blockade," she continued.

She said Cuba was waiting, however, to see exactly how the Obama administration will implement the changes.

Obama's announcement included a very general list of reforms and left a series of open questions about how far his government could go to create deeper economic ties with Cuba. The departments of Commerce and Treasury are expected to begin publishing the details of the new measures in coming weeks, changes that will include relaxation of the stringent rules governing American travel to Cuba.

Vidal said Cuba would only know how it would manage its end of the new relationship once the American government plan was clearer.

"We have to see how we are going to implement things," she said.

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Michael Weissenstein on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mweissenstein

Andrea Rodriguez on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ARodriguezAP

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Stockholm (AFP) - Temperatures in Finland rose almost twice as fast as in the rest of the world over the past 166 years, meteorologists said Monday, supporting claims global warming hits higher altitudes hardest.

Since 1847 "the average temperature in Finland has risen by more than two degrees," the Finnish Meteorological Institute said.

"During the observation period, the average increase was 0.14 degrees per decade, which is nearly twice as much as the global average."

The meteorologists based their statement on a study from the University of Eastern Finland, which concluded the climbing temperatures from 1847-2013 in the Nordic country are "in line with the notion that warming is stronger in higher latitudes."

November, December and January have seen the biggest temperature rises, with less significant increases in March, April and May, says professor Ari Laaksonen of the University of Eastern Finland and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

These changes have been visible in daily life with lakes freezing later in winter and trees blooming earlier in spring.

Record high temperatures in Alaska, below average snow cover across the Arctic and excess summer ice melting in Greenland were observed by scientists in 2014, raising new concerns about global warming.

The worrying weather was reported in the annual Arctic Report Card, compiled by 63 scientists in 13 countries, and was released on December 17 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Country where temperatures are rising fastest

Over the past 166 years, temperatures rose almost twice as fast here as in the rest of the world, meteorologists say.
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