the last book I ever read (American Warlord by Johnny Dwyer, excerpt nine)

from American Warlord: A True Story by Johnny Dwyer:

The new indictment detailed the events of the early morning hours of July 24, 2002, in Monrovia, referring to Dulleh simply as “the Victim” and to Yeaten as the “co-conspirator,” but implicating Chucky, under his four aliases, as the son of Charles Taylor and the commander of the Anti-Terrorist Unit.

“This marks the first time the Justice Department has charged a defendant with the crime of torture,” Assistant Attorney General Alice Fisher said in a prepared statement. “Crimes such as these will not go unanswered.”

It was a strange quote coming from the Bush administration Justice Department—in particular from Fisher, who would later become embroiled in the scandal surrounding the Office of Legal Counsel’s interpretation of the very statute that Chucky had been indicted under. Fisher’s connections to the interrogation practices used on detainees in the war on terror stretched back to 2002, when she had joined a delegation that toured Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay (incidentally just weeks after Dulleh was detained by the ATU). According to journalist Jane Mayer, the lawyers on that junket sat in on an interrogation of a detainee. Later, in 2005, Senator Carl M. Levin, who was looking into detainee abuse allegations, briefly held up Fisher’s nomination for assistant attorney general. Following her confirmation, the issue continued to dog her. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility probed whether in her prior role as deputy assistant attorney general she had sanctioned the use of torture, or—as the Bush administration referred to it—enhanced interrogation methods on terrorism suspects.