Abu Zubaydah and the Case Against [Mormon] Torture Architect James Mitchell

By Andy Worthington

Attempts to call to accountability any of the architects of the Bush administration’s torture program have so far been depressingly unsuccessful. First, any hopes that President Obama would lead the way were dashed when, even before taking office, the President-Elect declared “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” Then, in January this year, the best hope to date — the final report of a four-year internal investigation into the Justice Department lawyers who wrote the “torture memos” in 2002 and 2003 that purported to redefine torture so that it could be practiced by the CIA, and later by the US military — was shattered when a senior Justice Department official was allowed to override the report’s damning conclusions, declaring that, instead of facing disciplinary measures for “professional misconduct,” the men in question — John Yoo, now a professor at Berkeley, and Jay S. Bybee, now a judge in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — had only exercised “poor judgment.”

Read the rest of this article here.