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ABC's Jan Crawford Greenberg and Adriane de Vogue: Bush administration blocked waterboarding critic:
Levin was "forced out of the Justice Department" when Alberto Gonzales was made attorney general, ABC further reports.A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration's legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News.
Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.
After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn't die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.
Levin, who refused to comment for this story, concluded waterboarding could be illegal torture unless performed in a highly limited way and with close supervision. And, sources told ABC News, he believed the Bush Administration had failed to offer clear guidelines for its use. ...
Former Office of Legal Counsel hand Marty Lederman comments:
... What can one add to this? And what does it tell us that the story has been met with a collective yawn from the rest of the media? We have become so accustomed, so inured, to what would once have been unthinkable, that a story such as this, right out of a bad B-movie, is seen as business-as-usual, dog-bites-man. ...
I'm trying to avoid hyperbole, honest. But how is this not a huge scandal, in form (but certainly not in degree) directly analogous to what we, at Nuremburg, prosecuted German Justice Department lawyers for having done? ... One other thing: I am not the only person who thinks this is so outrageous. Think about who must have leaked this story to Jan Greenburg. I am reliably informed by those who know him that it wasn't Levin. (Greenburg notes that he refused to comment for the story.) But it must have been someone else high up in DOJ at the time who undoubtedly does not relish the idea of revealing confidences, but who was aghast at what transpired, and sickened when Judge Mukasey and the Senate this week effectively whitewashed and ratified our torture regime.