Human rights groups and advocacy organizations have urged the U.S. Senate to reject the nomination of John Rizzo to serve as General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency because of his stated views on torture. The letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and press release can be viewed here.
We are writing to urge you to reject the nomination of John Rizzo to serve as General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency on the basis of his June 19, 2007 testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
These are deeply troubling statements given that the memorandum makes the outrageous claim that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” The memorandum contains an extraordinarily narrow definition of psychological torture. Further, it asserts that the President, as Commander in Chief, has the constitutional authority to ignore laws that have been enacted by Congress and therefore cannot be prevented from authorizing U.S officials to use torture. But Mr. Rizzo says that he found the memorandum “persuasive” and does not feel – even now – that he should have raised objections to it.
As the acting chief legal officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. Rizzo occupied a position of extraordinary trust with the American people. He was privy to discussions and decisions that were not revealed to the public. The American people relied on him – as did the President and Mr. Rizzo’s colleagues at the CIA – to say “no” when offered specious legal theories redefining torture and arguing that the President can disregard duly adopted criminal statutes.
We found other answers offered by Mr. Rizzo to the Committee deeply troubling. His parsing of the nature of the CIA’s obligations under Common Article 3 hinted that perhaps the only fully binding prohibitions were those made criminal offenses by Congress in the Military Commissions Act. He declined to offer the same assurance offered in public by President Bush when he said that the United States would never render a prisoner to a country that used torture. But it is a more than sufficient basis to reject his nomination that he found the “torture memorandum” reasonable and persuasive and does not – even now – see why he should have raised objections to it.
When Mr. Rizzo failed to object to legal arguments that defended torture, he failed to protect his clients – the President, his CIA colleagues and the American people. He compounded this failure by effectively telling the Committee that he would do the same thing again. Consequently, the Committee has ample grounds to reject his nomination and we urge that it do so.