FBI Knows Bush Detainee Policies Won't Hold Up In Court

by Steve

Chalk this up as just one more area where Democrats could push around the Bush Administration and win, if Democrats had the guts to do so. And yet we find out the FBI knows the interrogation programs cooked up in David Addington and John Yoo’s wicked minds don’t work and are a legal nightmare that have just sprung wide open.

The FBI is quietly reconstructing the cases against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 14 other accused Al Qaeda leaders being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, spurred in part by U.S. concerns that years of CIA interrogation have yielded evidence that is inadmissible or too controversial to present at their upcoming war crimes tribunals, government officials familiar with the probes said.

The process is an embarrassment for the Bush administration, which for years held the men incommunicado overseas and allowed the CIA to use coercive means to extract information from them that would not be admissible in a U.S. court of law -- and might not be allowed in their military commissions, some former officials and legal experts said. Even if the information from the CIA interrogations is allowed, they said, it would probably risk focusing the trials on the actions of the agency and not the accused.

We’ve known for years and especially over the last 12-18 months that the Bush Administration was on shaky and even illegal ground with its detainee interrogation and rendition programs. And yet despite Bush’s repeated obfuscations about him not approving torture or refusal to address the black sites around the world, and his refusal to close Guantanamo, the Democrats have never seemingly mounted a frontal challenge to the Cheney/Addington regime or this country’s backward slide into banana republic lawlessness, where the Geneva Convention protocols and willful violation of international laws for useless intelligence are the norm.

It’s not as if there aren’t GOP allies for such an effort. Both John McCain and Lindsey Graham, despite their craven behavior on other issues have been quite forceful against torture and have both been lied to by this White House about the administration’s commitment to the rule of law and cleaning up its act, as the recent Frontline episode on Cheney and Addington showed.