
Under President George W. Bush, Steven Bradbury authored notorious memos condoning the CIA's use of torture. During a confirmation hearing, Sen. Tammy Duckworth made absolutely sure that his repugnant history was front and center.

It comes as no surprise that Donald Trump, who repeatedly praised torture during his campaign and said he would bring back waterboarding, wants to bring an author of the infamous torture memo under President George W. Bush to his administration.

Trump nominated Steven Bradbury to be general counsel at the Department of Transportation. But during his confirmation hearing, Illinois Democratic Sen. Tammy Duckworth made absolutely sure that everyone in the room, and everyone watching from home, thought of nothing but Bradbury's disturbing history.

The torture memos, she said to him, "made you so unacceptable that the then majority leader offered to confirm 84 stalled Bush administration nominees — 84 — in exchange with the withdrawal of just one nominee — you. That is quite the ransom you commanded."


"You were an architect of the legal justification for detainee abuse in the form of waterboarding and other forms of torture. In my opinion, that alone should disqualify you for future government service," she continued.

As acting assistant attorney general, and later the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under Bush, Bradbury co-authored three notorious and disturbing memos authorizing the use of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the CIA.

That anodyne phrase always hid the true nature of those methods, which were nothing but torture. And it was those memos in particular that scuttled Bradbury's nomination in 2008 to be assistant attorney general.

The gruesome details spelled out in the Senate Intelligence Committee's 2014 report on the CIA's detention and interrogation programs were shocking and horrifying, and seemed to utterly belie everything for which the United States would claim to stand regarding human rights and morality.

And that someone responsible for crafting such repulsive schemes and mendaciously packaging them up as nothing more than business as usual in time of war could even be considered, let alone nominated, for any government position is beyond comprehension.

Except, apparently, for Donald Trump.

But Duckworth, herself an Iraq War veteran, was not about to let anyone in that room off the hook, or to let Bradbury's resume be swept under the rug.

"Your willingness to aid and abet torture," Duckworth said, "demonstrates a failure of moral and professional character that makes you dangerous regardless of which agency you serve in."

She declared that she has "no confidence" that Bradbury would effectively perform the role of ensuring that other government employees acted with accordance to the Constitution, considering his demonstrated willingness to "use tortured legal maneuvers very much to get around the laws and the Constitution of the United States."

Duckworth went on to list some of the most vile and barbaric torture techniques that Bradbury approved in his memos:

In one of the programs you justified, detainees were sleep-deprived for up to 180 hours — that's seven and a half days — forced into stress positions, sometimes shackled to the ceiling, subject to rectal hydration and feeding, confined in boxes the size of a small dog crate. CIA personnel conducted mock executions. One man was waterboarded to the point that he became completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth. Another man was frozen to death.

She noted that some of these abuses may not have been explicitly authorized, "but brutality, once sanctioned by the likes of you — by the likes of you — is not easily contained." And she reminded the assembled lawmakers that Bradbury found legal loopholes to get around the Geneva Convention in order to allow torture to continue.

And as Bradbury once defended Bush by declaring that "the president is always right," it is terrifying to imagine what that belief could give rise to under Trump.

"The actions you help justify put our troops in harm's way, put our diplomats deployed overseas in harm's way, and you compromised our nation's very values," Duckworth stated. "You lack the judgment to stand up and say what is morally right."

She closed her powerful comments by declaring that she "can't oppose this nomination strongly enough."

One can only hope that her colleagues were listening to every word she said, and that they will concern themselves with upholding what moral standing our nation can still lay claim to, and not with placating a president who would even think about allowing someone like Bradbury to join another administration.

Watch her full remarks below (complete transcript follows):