Remember When?

Posted on | April 23, 2009

Jason Leopold reminds us of a previous liberal vendetta against waterboarding, carried out by Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice, back when we thought the practice illegal:

In 1983, the Justice Department prosecuted a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies for waterboarding prisoners to get them to confess to crimes.

The deputies were sentenced to four years in prison and Parker pleaded guilty to extortion and federal civil rights violations and received a 10-year sentence. Parker admitted that he had operated a “marijuana trap” on U.S. Highway 59, arrested suspects, and, according to court documents, subjected “prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions.

“This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning,” the complaint said, which referred to the technique as “water torture.”

Yet nowhere in the four “torture” memos released by the Justice Department last week that authorized the CIA to waterboard detainees do the attorneys who drafted the legal opinions mention the federal case U.S. v Parker et al, in which San Jacinto County Sheriff James Parker and three deputies– Carl Lee, Floyd Allen Baker and John Glover—were found guilty of torturing at least six prisoners between 1976 and 1980 in a rural part of the state 60 miles outside of Houston.

The failure to cite U.S v Parker, as well as a half-dozen other precedent setting cases that dealt with torture, is reportedly one of the critical findings of a Justice Department watchdog report that legal sources said concluded “professional standards” were violated by former Office of Legal Counsel chiefs Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo.

We have lost something essential.

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