Get News & Views Updates
Most Popular This Week
- Senate Votes to Extend Sweeping Bush Era Surveillance Powers
- Six Weeks After Reelection, Obama Sells Out Liberal Democrats
- The Only Way Left to Beat GOP Fanatics: Call Their Bluff and Go Over the Fabricated "Cliff"
- New Year’s Revolution: Connecting the Dots, Coming Together and Fighting Like Hell
- The Financial Elite's War Against the US Economy
- Six Weeks After Reelection, Obama Sells Out Liberal Democrats
- Revealed: How the FBI Coordinated the Crackdown on Occupy
- The Financial Elite's War Against the US Economy
- Senate Votes to Extend Sweeping Bush Era Surveillance Powers
- New Year’s Revolution: Connecting the Dots, Coming Together and Fighting Like Hell
Popular content
Today's Top News
Nightmares Made Law
The four secret US department of justice opinions released this week are jaw-dropping in their detail. They reveal how far the Bush administration was prepared to go in sanctioning interrogation techniques that plainly amount to torture.
The long-awaited publication of the August 2002 memo, signed by Jay Bybee but largely written by John Yoo, authorises 10 previously unlawful interrogation techniques. These include slapping, stress position and sleep deprivation, right up to waterboarding. It is doubtful a more shocking legal opinion has ever been written. It even purports to analyse if incarcerating a detainee in a small box with an insect for company would amount to mental torture (it depends what you tell him about its sting).
This is the stuff of dark nightmares, the rubber-stamping of policy rather than legal advice in the sense usually understood. It indicates how far the Bush administration fell, the kind of reasoning that infected a raft of policies and to which the British government often turned a blind eye. It has caused untold damage to US national security, and to its reputation.
When the memo was written, the administration had already fixed a policy of abuse, and the torture had already started. Lawyers were needed to provide the "golden shield" against prosecution. The memo did not benefit from the usual consultations; the many lawyers who would have objected were simply cut out of the process. A small group of lawyer-ideologues became participants in international crime, acts for which any state may, under the 1984 torture convention, exercise criminal jurisdiction. The evidence suggests complicity with the consequences that flowed from these flawed opinions - which went on to underpin CIA and military interrogations in Guantánamo, Iraq and beyond in the rendition programme.
On releasing the opinions, President Obama explained he was motivated by a desire for truthfulness. He has made clear that the CIA interrogators who relied on them in good faith should not be prosecuted, and in so doing confirmed that crimes have been committed. He chose his words with evident care: he could have said there would be no prosecutions - but he didn't. He did not offer a general get-out-of-jail-free card; rather, he has pointed the finger of responsibility at the lawyers, one of his early acts being to prohibit future interrogators from relying on any department of justice advice prepared between 9/11 and January 2009.
Obama walks a tightrope on an issue that may yet come to dog his first term: what to do about torture practised during a "dark and painful" period? He balances an understandable desire for bipartisanship with obligations under the torture convention to pursue criminal investigations. "This will be worked out over time," he told Spanish CNN on Thursday, referring to possible criminal investigations by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón of the "Bush Six", the administration officials who played a central role in devising the policy of abuse. It seems no coincidence that this week's developments occurred within a few hours of the move by Spain's attorney general to head off a criminal investigation of the Bush Six, reasoning that the real targets should include those who physically carried out the torture.
If there was co-ordination, it seems to have gone askew. Obama is right not to target the interrogators in the sense that real responsibility lies much higher up. The senior lawyers and their patrons should derive little comfort from his intervention: they remain at risk of criminal investigation - or worse, in a legal black hole of their own making.
- Posted in
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
17 Comments so far
Show AllIf you don't threaten the interrogators why should they implicate their superiors?
Of course failure to testify truthfully would be obstruction of justice. And with imunity the fifth amendment is not aplicable.
If carried out thoroughly, this idea that people cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed on behalf of elements within government would remove all Constitutional protections for individual rights.
Prosecution has to threaten those it can realistically indict. Of course, in this case this includes Bush and Cheney and Yoo and the rest of the legal team, does it not?
No implications are necessary all the evidence needed for conviction is spelled out by the attorneys in their own memos. The victims could testify as to their being tortured. Slam dunk conviction.
First the attorneys and then Bush et. al.
Glenn Ford
"Obama is right not to target the interrogators in the sense that real responsibility lies much higher up."
No, Obama is wrong not to target the torturers (as well as those "higher up"). We don't need any more apologists for U.S. torturers, Mr. Sands.
Any "toturer" who believed Bush Administration lawyers, should be waterboarded.
If your corporate lawyers tell you it"s OK to commit a crime against humanity, it must be OK.
No... most torturer's have minimal awareness of contitutional law and the Geneva Convention. If you work in the torture field, you will know the laws that govern your profession. Just as doctors know their laws, acountants know their laws....
And.. to have a Constutional Lawyer, from Harvard, feeding us this shit.
How disingenuous. At least he's better than his predecessor ? Maybe
Estebandito
You are so right. Many of the people I know have nothing good to say about people who protest. They think of them as trouble makers or like it's a big joke. Protesters are viewed as the actual problem or part of it...
I'm a protester. but most of my family just cannot wrap their minds around it at all, including my husband.
Many people are confused, as you say. That's the thing. It does take REAL LISTENING and reading in order to understand the issues which we are dealing with. Then again, some people have just given up...
How ANYONE raised in this country and taught about it's laws could possibly think that ANY of this torturing could possibly be legal is just beyond me. I knew once it came out years ago that this had been going on that laws were being broken. And reading these memos and the previous ones as well told me that we were no longer a nation that gave a damn about legality at all. Only when it comes to prosecuting those who do horrible things like smoke cannabis do we care about laws. When it comes to things like breaking national and international laws, we don't give a flying rat's ass anymore. Those at the top hold NO responsibility for their actions, it's only WE the people who have to bear any brunt of the law for ours.
I don't care if it takes W and Cheney down, in fact, I say got for it BECAUSE it will. They have come right out and said that they were doing illegal things, and in Cheney's case, DARED anyone to do something about it. I say that WE DO. I say we take these scumbags to court, and put them in a jail of their own making. Send them to Gitmo and let them live like they forced others to. As we used to say, the punishment should fit the crime.
It's absolutely shameful that our own gov't can seem to find time to prosecute anyone but US, and nothing WE are doing out here is nearly as serious as what THEY have done, and in come cases condoned themselves if not actually involved beforehand.
I think it's going to take a massive movement on OUR part to get anything to happen here. WE have to demand justice, because the entire gov't has proved that it's not willing to live up to any decent set of standards. It's up to US to force them to do so. Just like we should have when Nixon was breaking HIS set of laws. If we had done our part then, we wouldn't have had Cheney and Rummy coming back to push things even further into illegality and inhumanity. This is truly OUR fault. WE have to fix thing, now.
It's time to raise holy hell on them and force them to do the right thing. If we don't, we truly are finished as the country we should be.
You, "America", are finished as the country you should be simply because these things ---and much more than you most likely know about or will ever know about----took place.
GW Bush and his administration were simply the "head of the snake".
Without corrupt members of the establishment and your society from every level, none of this would have taken place.
The USA and the American people as a whole are an arrogant and corrupt people, the few that are decent are so out numbered that they have no influence.
America was a good idea, but never lived up to its potential, has been doomed from the start because of the mind set of those who are in control and the mind set of those who put them in control.
Good Luck America, you really need it.
Please don't cave in to resignation yet.
We are actually on "The threshold of our Common Dreams "
Lets look iInto the microcosm of USA history ( as compared and symbolic of all of World history )
Of course the history on the USA is blighted by nefarious abuses, illegalities, and imperistic urges to doiminate and control the world for massive unquenced thrists toward greed and more power.
We'll call this _ M A R S _ R U L E S _ ( per SIOUXROSE, thanks )
But, in a parallel course all along that history of evil tendencies, we have profound establishment and institutionization of the Sovereignty, Dignity, and Inalienable Rights of ALL HUMAN BEINGS.
Let's call this V E N U S _ R U L E S
This second and more important trajectory of the USA is equally as ever increasing and advancing in scope and power as the first -- as they are intertwined as is our DNA ( the male and female of it, as it were ) and the struggle between altruistic and selfish tendencies within society.
I beleive that we already have the very bestest of L U CK in the entire universe, and that the cumulation of these two opposing and rising crescendos and tendencies is the very struggle of LIFE itself to grow and thrive.
The one cannot exist without the other, and it is for every human being to chose in every moment " which wolf will it feed "
The increasingly the blatant contrasts and stark realities are exposed -- and it is EXACTLY this is that is needed, necssary, and required to further growth and transformation.
¿ How else to we awaken the slumbering millions,
who refuse to perceive their complicity ?
¿ How else do we get moving those apparently asleep millions,
who really are pretending to be asleep ?
Everyday,
everyone of us must decide
- - - in each moment - - -
what are we commited to creating
Namaste
Sioux Rose
P.T/Namaste: I see if I retire (from CD), there will be a replacement who can quote the Logos as necessary! Bravo.
as executive it is 0's primary duty to investigate and prosecute these crimes.
"in good faith" my arse!
0 promised change.
he changed his mind.
Hector --
vdb writes, "0 promised change. he changed his mind."
I fear that it's far more venal than a change of mind.
How much anthrax was Bush and Cheney willing to mail to get the USAPATRIOT Act?
Obama has admitted that crimes were committed. If he refuses to allow the justice department to investigate, arrest, charge and try the perpetrators then he becomes an accessory after the fact. He becomes guilty of those same crimes himself. This government is an out of control juggernaut and a rogue actor upon the world stage. Just remember, people, what goes around comes around, and we as a people are allowing our government's continued behavior.
"Obama is right not to target the interrogators in the sense that real responsibility lies much higher up."
OH. The "just following orders" defense. Nice.