VIDEO-- Feith Responds: ‘I Never Advocated’ For Torture, I Was Just ‘Giving Advice’

By GottaLaff


Here is my earlier post about Spain's taking steps to investigate BushCo 's illegal torture practices. Now Doug Feith is saying he merely gave advice about, you know, committing war crimes:

Yesterday, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, one of the officials implicated in the complaint, went on Fox News to defend himself in front of torture advocate Bill O’Reilly.

Feith argued that the charges that he helped approve torture are completely bogus. “I’m being criticized for a position that I never advocated. And so the facts are just wrong,” he said. Feith said he was simply giving “advice” to President Bush and had no role in “directing” torture policy. [...]

But last year, Feith himself bragged in an interview with British law professor Phillippe Sands that he played a pivotal role in ensuring that Geneva protections against “outrages upon personal dignity” did not apply to detainees:

I asked Feith, just to be clear: Didn’t the administration’s approach mean that Geneva’s constraints on interrogation couldn’t be invoked by anyone at Guantánamo? “Oh yes, sure,” he shot back. Was that the intended result?, I asked. “Absolutely,” he replied. I asked again: Under the Geneva Conventions, no one at Guantánamo was entitled to any protection? “That’s the point,” Feith reiterated. … “This year I was really a player,” Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory.

Indeed, Feith’s arguments became official U.S. policy with the signing of a presidential memorandum on February 7, 2002.

Isn't he just precious? How could we ever have thought the worst?