Armitage cops a plea on torture: "...had I known about it at the time..." [UPDATE]

ya know, i read shit like this and i just want to puke... armitage was high up in the government ranks, privy to damn near everything that was going on... besides that, he had the news media, both traditional and alternative, available to him just like the rest of us... when the torture issue became visible and, let's face it, it became visible early on in the bush administration, armitage would have been well placed to go find out the real skinny... now, he's out there telling us what he WOULD have done if ONLY he had KNOWN... how fucking disingenuous can this guy be and think that anybody is going to swallow it...?

A former senior US state department official has told Al Jazeera he hopes he would have had the courage to resign if he had known the CIA was waterboarding suspects while he was in office.

"I hope, had I known about it at the time I was serving, I would've had the courage to resign. But I don't know. It's in hindsight now," Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, told Al Jazeera's Faultlines programme.

He also said he considered the interrogation technique, where detainees are made to feel like they are drowning, to be torture, but said he did not believe CIA officials who used that method and other forms of harsh interrogation, should be prosecuted.

armitage is one of the craftiest snakes that's ever slithered through the higher echelons of the state department... he sees the writing on the wall... he's paying attention to what's happening in spain and he's going to be damned if he takes a fall... he's covering his own ass big time and, as he takes care to point out below, if he goes down, he's taking others down with him...

Armitage said members of US congress were as much to blame as Bush administration officials for failing to perform adequate oversight of US detentions, interrogations and "renditions" - the transfer of suspects to overseas prisons with different rules from the US.

"I don't think members of the senate particularly wanted to look into these things and they might have to look themselves in the mirror," he said.

"Where were they? They weren't doing their job, they were AWOL [absent without leave]."

what a positively disgusting, totally self-serving display of snake-hood...

p.s. my apologies to righteous snakes everywhere for conflating this scumbag with your species...

[UPDATE]

juan cole weighs in with his thoughts and the al jazeera youtube clip...

Armitage's revelation that he and his boss "lost" a battle to preserve a commitment to the Geneva Conventions in Washington in this period seems likely to me to become part of the Spanish prosecution.

if the bastard is fighting a "battle" and "lost," how the hell can he claim he was ignorant...? just askin'...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet