Another Busy Week for President Obama: Pollution / Torture Memos / Cuba Policy
Another busy week for President Obama. And I didn’t even mention the new White House dog because enough other people did!
From the New York Times:
The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday formally declared carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases to be pollutants that threaten public health and welfare, setting in motion a process that for the first time in the United States will regulate the gases blamed for global warming.
The E.P.A. said the science supporting its so-called endangerment finding was “compelling and overwhelming.” The ruling triggers a 60-day comment period before any proposed regulations governing emissions of greenhouse gases are published.
Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A. administrator, said: “This finding confirms that greenhouse gas pollution is a serious problem now and for future generations. Fortunately, it follows President Obama’s call for a low-carbon economy and strong leadership in Congress on clean energy and climate legislation.”
From The Times of London:
The most striking feature of four highly classified documents, drawn up to address “whether certain enhanced interrogation techniques” being used by the CIA on terror suspects constitute torture, is the sheer detail.
Exceeding 100 pages, some of the most senior lawyers from the Bush Administration included all the footnotes and precedents that might be expected of memorandums issued under the authority of the US Justice Department.
The memos relied on a fairly simple legal principle: so long as the interrogators did not cause intense, severe or lasting physical pain and psychological damage, they were not torturing suspects and would therefore be exempt from any prosecution.
As such they provide a manual about exactly how far they could go to stay within the letter – if not the spirit – of the law. For example, the temperature of water used to douse detainees should be no lower than 41F, while exposure should not exceed 20 minutes “without drying and rewarming”. Waterboarding was not supposed to last more than 40 seconds, so, “in the absence of prolonged mental harm, no severe mental pain or suffering would have been inflicted and the use of these procedures would not constitute torture within the meaning of the statute”.
President Bush leant upon this legal advice when asked in 2004 if he had allowed the CIA to torture suspects. “The authorisation I issued was that anything we did would conform to US laws and would be consistent with international treaty obligations,” he said. The same formula was used by Dick Cheney, the former Vice President, who, when describing the use of waterboarding as a “no-brainer for me”, added the caveat that “we live up to our obligations that we’re party to in international treaties and so forth”.
From FoxNews:
PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago — As President Obama touched down Friday here for the Summit of the Americas, the White House embraced new calls from Cuba’s Communist government to engage in talks – as well as the possibility that the country could lift press restrictions and free political prisoners as part of those talks.
Raul Castro, brother of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and de facto leader of the island nation 90 miles south of Florida, said Thursday that “everything” would be up for discussion with the Obama administration. He also said the Cuban government may have been “wrong” in avoiding U.S.-Cuba talks in the past.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday that the administration was struck by that language.
“I think the strongest reaction that we all had is the admission that he may have been wrong,” Gibbs said aboard Air Force One as the president flew from Mexico City for the fifth Summit of the Americas. “I think that we were particularly struck by that.”
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