"A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security."This is a separate memorandum from the one declaring that international law did not apply to anyone the US labeled as 'enemy combatants.'
As someone who works with lawyers, I sort of wish they'd come up with a title that reflected that this is a political and ideological position, rather than one maintained by lawyers generally. Lawyers are ALSO battling for detainees' rights, after all.
Memo Offered Justification for Use of Torture (washingtonpost.com, 06/08/04) provides additional rationalizations for torture, including the wacky idea of simply redefining torture.
In the Justice Department's view -- contained in a 50-page document signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee and obtained by The Washington Post -- inflicting moderate or fleeting pain does not necessarily constitute torture. Torture, the memo says, "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."Yes, our government has come up with a new way for us to win hearts and minds!
The consistent thread that runs through the memoranda and other spooky revelations is that this Administration considers itself to be above the law, with any barrier to absolute power quickly being disregarded, ESPECIALLY international laws and laws that apply to foreigners. Our democratic ideals and insistence that we're a good people should apparently stand, even in the presence of voluminous evidence that our leaders are sliding the other way.
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In March, the Nation followed up a 2003 article called "In Torture We Trust" with extremely creepy info. The update also called 'In Torture We Trust' also has highly disturbing content:
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz famously proposed allowing US judges to issue "torture warrants" to prevent potentially catastrophic terrorist attacks. Writing in The New Republic last fall, Richard Posner, a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, expressed reservations about Dershowitz's proposal but argued that "if the stakes are high enough, torture is permissible. No one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility."If you've been sleeping too peacefully lately, you should read the entire article (4 web pages long), which includes discussions of how torture has been used by other governments.
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I wonder how many of the unintelligible warnings we receive about potential terrorist attacks against the US ('the u.s. will be attacked hard,'!?!?) are acquired through torture.
I don't know how many of you ever read excerpts of Inquisition trials, but it does appear you can force just about anyone to confess to just about anything when they're in enough pain. One alleged 'witch' was tortured into saying that she dated the devil and that he'd given her the ability to fly by providing her with a box of fat with a stick in it. The testimony didn't save her life, but it certainly caused a lot of head scratching among her torturers. I suspect she just wasn't asked sufficiently leading questions. ("Say the U.S. will be attacked with __________, or we'll _______ your _____" is about how I imagine it.)
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In other recent news, former chief US weapons inspector David Kay says it's "delusional" to believe that WMDs exist in Iraq (BBC, 06/05/04).
"We simply got it wrong," he said. "Iraq was a dangerous country, Saddam was an evil man and we are better off without him and all of that. But we were wrong in our estimation."(I like the 'and all of that.')
And, if you missed it, the New York Times' public editor has performed a review of the Times' coverage of the WMD issue, and has found it lacking. Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or Mass Distraction? by Daniel O'Krent (nytimes.com, 05/30/04) and the Times' critique of articles whose assertions have never been proven provide hindsight about the paper's rush to judgment.
The articles have inspired a lot of commentary, some of which is so ideologically based that it would inspire laughter if we didn't have to live in the same country with the authors. None of the authors were this concise, but some retorts basically said 'by retracting unproveable self-interested exile myths and discredited news stories, you are surrendering to terrorists.'
For a very profane criticism of the Times, see Get Your War On, page 36. (When I say profane, I really mean profane. Yet rather accurate, and really funny. Suggested message from the NYT to its readers: "Why the hell are you still reading us? Does Judith Miller have to kill you herself?")
