Torture Showdown Coming?

"'Radio silence was the response when today's witnesses were asked to identify a single example of a true 'ticking bomb' scenario ever occurring, even though such scenarios are often invoked to justify torture,' Conyers said. 'These scholars, who have studied this issue extensively and have intimate knowledge of the legal authority the administration sought, could not identify a single example. I hope that the administration officials who have agreed to testify will shed some light on this and many other questions raised in today's hearing.'"

Here are the prepared statements from the witnesses at the Tuesday hearing.

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris writes on huffingtonpost.com: "While I was working on Standard Operating Procedure, many people asked about 'the smoking gun.' 'Have you found the smoking gun? Have you found the smoking gun? -- presumably linking the abuses to the upper levels of the Defense Department and to the White House?' The question puzzles me. There are smoking guns everywhere but people don't see them, refuse to see them or pretend they don't exist. How many torture memos does an administration have to promulgate before the public gets the idea they are promulgating torture? Bush has recently admitted that he was present at these meetings and approved 'harsh interrogation techniques.' And yet this has scarcely been a news story. Well-documented attempts to subvert the Constitution, abrogation of the Geneva Conventions and simple human decency. What does it take?

"We are surrounded by smoking guns on all sides. Crimes have been committed; we have ample evidence of them. But there can be no justice if there is a failure to stand up for it, if we fail to demand it. . . .

"It is easy to dismiss all of this as the unfortunate product of war. But this is not about war, it is about us. How complacent have we become? What does it take? Each day that we allow these crimes to go unanswered erodes the very ideals that this country stands for."

White House E-Mail Watch

Dan Eggen writes in The Washington Post: "The Bush administration has not found disaster recovery files for White House e-mails from a three-month time period in 2003, according to court documents filed this week, raising the possibility that messages sent before and after the invasion of Iraq may never be recovered.

"The White House chief information officer, Theresa Payton, said in a sworn declaration that the White House has identified more than 400 computer backup tapes from March through September of 2003 but that the earliest recorded file was dated May 23 of that year.

"That period was one of the most crucial of the Bush presidency. The United States launched the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, and President Bush declared the end of major combat operations on May 1. . . .

"Administration officials had acknowledged last year that thousands of e-mails might be missing from White House servers, but the administration has shifted course in recent months to arguing there is still no clear evidence of a problem. A White House spokesman declined to comment yesterday."

Here's a news release from the National Security Archive, one of the parties in the ongoing litigation.

"'What is most shocking is that if anyone at the White House was deleting their e-mails during the invasion of Iraq, those e-mails are not on any back-up tapes,' said Archive director Tom Blanton. . . .

"'The White House learned in October 2003 that e-mails from the Vice President's office may not have been preserved. In October 2005, EOP first discovered that potentially millions of e-mails were missing,' said Archive general counsel Meredith Fuchs. 'But in May 2008, the White House still can't figure out which e-mails are lost but continues to speculate that the e-mails "should" be on back-up tapes.'"