Save the Ink

Here's a suggestion for how to save money at the Pensacola News Journal: Drop the David Broder column. By the time that D.C. syndicated columnist's apologies for lawlessness appear in the Pensacola newspaper, his consistently fraudulent facts and defective reasoning already have been exposed.

Blindly Looking Forward

Florida headlines:

• Judy Hall of Gulf Breeze, age 61, was arrested yesterday and "charged with carrying a concealed weapon, bringing a gun onto a school campus and resisting arrest without violence." She had her reasons, even if they were patently idiotic. Let's look forward, people, not backward.

• In Lauderdale Lake, Florida, four men have been "charged with killing a Sunrise man in a case of mistaken identity that started with threats made on a social networking site and through text messaging." But, hey, they made a mistake, that's all. We shouldn't dwell on the past. Let's concentrate on the future.

• In Miami two days ago, a police patrol car that was supposed to be slowly cruising along struck and killed "a Florida City landscaper as he crossed the street in front of his house." The good news is the dead man's last act was to push his wife out of the path of the recklessly speeding patrol car. No need to wait on the driver's toxicology test results. Let him go. We need to appreciate what we have, not look back on what we've lost.

• Along the Florida Turnpike in south Florida earlier this week, Miami-Dade police pulled a truck driver over after a large piece of styrofoam blew off the truck, revealing half a ton of marijuana on its way to market. How pointless, to arrest a hard working man who's struggling just to survive in this dicey economy. Call off the investigators! We need to face forward, not back!

National headlines:

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs explained Monday that the White House does not plan for the Justice Department to prosecute even the highest-level Bush administration executives who ordered torture, contrary to U.S. law and international treaties. Why?

• MR. GIBBS: "The President is focused on looking forward, that's why."

Criminal Since the Time of Cain

When the complete history of the Bush administration is written, it will reveal a criminal enterprise engaged in brutality every bit as revolting as --

• Japanese interrogators during W.W. II, whom we prosecuted for "waterboarding" and illegal torture";
• "Indonesia" and "Iran", which for years we have publicly condemned for engaging in "psychological torture" and "food and sleep deprivation" of prisoners;
  
• "Egypt" whose torture of prisoners we have condemned because it involved "stripping and blindfolding victims, suspending victims from a ceiling or doorframe with feet just touching the floor, beating victims... and dousing victims with cold water"; and
  
• "Algeria" for using the "chiffon method" of "placing a rag drenched in dirty water in someone's mouth."

The examples, above, come from "legal memoranda" written by high-ranking Bush administration lawyers which explicitly approved torturing prisoners.

Four of those memos were publicly released yesterday:

The four legal opinions, released in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the A.C.L.U., were written in 2002 and 2005 by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the highest authority in interpreting the law in the executive branch.

To be sure, President Obama revoked these very memos on his "second day in office" and "condemned what he called a "dark and painful chapter in our history." He's also promised "the interrogation techniques would never be used again."

Until the next time, that is. Because even as he released the evidence of war crimes, Obama also promised "that C.I.A. officers who were acting on the Justice Department’s legal advice would not be prosecuted."

It simply is not enough to leave each new presidential administration to decide which laws of humanity it will follow and which it will discard. In a democracy committed by Constitution and Treaty to being a republic governed by laws, crimes against humanity should not be treated like mere agency regulations or presidential signing statements, to be issued and revoked at will.

As our own nation argued successfully at the Nuremburg trials, "civilization cannot tolerate" acts which have been regarded as criminal "since the time of Cain." Those ultimately responsible for approving this must be prosecuted and, if found guilty, punished. Even if -- no, especially if -- some of them like Jay Bybee, now sit as federal judges, judging others.

At Nuremberg, we prosecuted the lawyers and judges who were complicit in the Nazi depravities. We owe it to ourselves to do no less when those depraved lawyers and judges are our own.

Dept. of Further Amplification
4-17 pm

Scott Lemieux properly points a finger at Senate Democrats who, in 2003, lay down on the job of 'advising and consenting' to give Torture Memo author-in-chief Jay Bybee a lifetime federal judgeship.

How can this be permitted to stand? Imagine the hundreds, even thousands, of lawyers who over the coming years will have to appear, in this or that case, before "the honorable" Jay Bybee, now unmasked, himself, as a key figure in the Bush cabal of war criminals. It would be like enduring proctology exams by Dr. Josef Mengele, year after year, until the criminal is, at last, hustled off to his eternal reward.

Saturday Backstory on the Torture Memo

UPDATED BELOW
The Justice Department has at last declassified and turned over to the ACLU the infamous John Yoo torture memos. WaPo has more on the news.

Georgetown Law School professor Marty Lederman has the memos (Part 1 here; Part 2 here) and the fascinating back story:

On Friday, March 13, 2003, Jay Bybee resigned from his Office as the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, to become a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The very next day -- a Saturday, mind you -- John Yoo, merely a Deputy AAG in the Office, issued his notorious memo to the Pentagon, on behalf of OLC, which effectively gave the Pentagon the green light to disregard statutory limits on torture, cruelty and maltreatment in the treatment of detainees. This is the version of the 2002 Torture memo, which was addressed only to the CIA and the torture statute, as applied to the numerous statutes restricting the conduct of the armed forces. None of those statues, you see, limits the conduct of war if the President says so. It is, in effect, the blueprint that led to Abu Ghraib and the other abuses within the armed forces in 2003 and early 2004.

CBS's "60 Minutes" already has documented the kind of atrocities the Yoo memo led to. Glenn Greenwald adds a small snippet from Yoo claiming it's legal for the president to order the crushing of a child's testicles. Then he asks --

If writing memoranda authorizing torture -- actions which then directly lead to the systematic commission of torture -- doesn't make one a war criminal in the U.S., what does?

UPDATED
04-02 pm

Scott Horton has more.

UPDATED
04-03 am

Marty Liederman has a correction and an apology.

What Is Done In Our Name

The long running CBS television news magazine "60 Minutes" ran a segment last night on the 5-year "sale," arrest, interrogation, detention, and torture of Murat Kurnaz. The FBI, a shadowy U.S. intelligence agency, and German intelligence all concluded within a year that the poor boy knew nothing.

The whole thing had been a horrible mistake by the U.S. Department of Defense. Kevin Drum takes it from there:

[H]e wasn't released for several more years, and then only after the newly elected German chancellor made a personal appeal to George Bush. But why? Why didn't they release him earlier?

One can never rule out bureaucratic ineptitude, but the more likely explanation is that they were afraid he'd tell the world about his treatment. So they just kept him locked up instead.

Remember, George W. Bush and his administration is doing this in our name, we the people of the United States:

Bush Endorses Torture

Saturday, George W. Bush made history, of sort. He joined the ranks of Torquemada and a select few other political leaders in mankind's history by explicitly endorsing torture as a governing national policy for the Spanish Inquisition C.I.A.

It's his "legacy," says the New York Times. It's "the very talisman of his unchecked rule and his arrogant indifference to the rule of law," says Scott Horton.

No doubt most of the Sunday talking heads will offer Oh-So-Serious chatter about why waterboarding is not torture; or, even if it is, why it's okay as long as we are the torturers. Save yourself the time. Here's a send-up of the Beltway insanity that passes for Serious commentary these days, courtesy of The Onion:

Choice Words for Democrats

Lambert over at Corrente Wire nails the Democratic congressional leadership, more specifically Nancy Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller, and Jane Harman. They deserve it:

Since the voters put them back in power, the Democrats have taken impeachment off the table, punted on the war, never figured out a way to hold Republicans accountable for filibusters and obstructionism, so legislation is in the toilet, and never managed to use oversight power to do anything more than chip away around the edges of the Bush regime—though they have written a great number of Sternly Worded Letters.

And now, top Democrats turn out to be enablers of war crimes by our lawless executive. What a surprise. Harry, Nancy, nice work.

For a few choice four-letter words, if you're not easily offended, read the rest. Or, give Glenn Greenwald a read. He makes the same point in lawyer-like multi-syllables:

Torture didn't become an American policy despite the best efforts of a righteous Democratic leadership to stop that. Torture became an American policy precisely because a meek and often outright supportive Democratic leadership continuously allowed it.
* * *
I wish none of this were true. I wish we had a genuine, vibrant opposition party. It would be indescribably beneficial if the rare, isolated and usually marginalized voices within the Democratic Party (and the even rarer and more marginalized voices in the GOP) were predominant. But they just aren't. That's just a fact that can't be ignored. The Democratic Party in Congress is largely controlled and led by those who have enabled and affirmatively supported the worst aspects of the Bush foreign policy and the most severe abuses of our country's political values.
* * *
Whether it's the war in Iraq or illegal surveillance or the abolition of habeas corpus and now the systematic use of torture, it's the Bush administration that conceived of the policies, implemented them and presided over their corrupt application. But it's Congressional Democrats at the leadership level who were the key allies and enablers, never getting their hands dirty with implementation -- and thus feigning theatrical, impotent outrage once each abuse was publicly exposed -- but nonetheless working feverishly the entire time to enable all of it every step of the way.

Breaking the Circle of Torture

This week, the New York Times published a shocking investigative report on how the Bush/Cheney administration persistently has given its imprimatur to torture, an imprimatur made indelible by the administration's equally persistent -- and unconstitutional -- violation of congressional statutes and Supreme Court decisions. As Glenn Greenwald wrote, these detailed revelations --

involve the now-familiar, defining attributes of this administration -- claims of limitless presidential power, operating in total secrecy and with no oversight, breaking of laws at will, serial misleading of the Congress and the country and, most of all, the shattering of every previous moral and legal constraint on our national behavior."

Yet, as Greeenwald also points out, "None of this is new."

It has long been known that we are torturing, holding detainees in secret prisons beyond the reach of law and civilization, sending detainees to the worst human rights abusers to be tortured, and subjecting them ourselves to all sorts of treatment which both our own laws and the treaties to which we are a party plainly prohibit.
* * *
And we have decided, collectively as a country, to do nothing about that. Quite the contrary, with regard to most of the revelations of lawbreaking and abuse, our political elite almost in unison has declared that such behavior is understandable, if not justifiable. And our elected representatives have chosen to remain largely in the dark about what was done and, when forced by court rulings or media revelations to act at all, they have endorsed and legalized this behavior -- not investigated, outlawed or punished it.

Scott Horton reminds us that all of this became possible only after Bush and his henchmen engineered a purge in the U.S. Justice Department.

Extremely conservative lawyers who, whatever their political convictions, still believed in the enforcement and application of the law, were taken out. And in came a new team of “loyal Bushies,” people who understood their sole duty to be to implement the personal will of George W. Bush. In the immortal words uttered last week by John Yoo, “Every subordinate should agree with [the President’s] views so there is a unified approach to the law.” Yes. It’s called the Führerprinzip. But it sounds so much more convincing in the original German.

Predictably, Bush followed these revelations by once again denying in a conclusory kind of way that the U.S. endorses torture. But, also predictably, he offered no supporting facts, wouldn't take questions, and lowered the veil of government secrecy against the prying eyes of fellow Americans.

Even in his denial Bush the Führer further stained the presidential seal by advancing the cause of despotism and lawlessness. In the current issue of Time Magazine, Massimo Calabrisi (son of the former Yale Law dean and now Second U.S. Circuit Court judge) explains why: Bush's denial endangers the lives of our troops, now and in the future; indeed, it puts at risk the lives of everyone who may be taken into custody abroad, from the Buddhist monks of Burma to the dozen demonstrators from Cameroon who were arrested in Nigeria for peacefully pleading for political asylum in front of a U.S. embassy, to innocent American tourists.

Every time Bush asserts that the U.S does not torture, he is not just undermining his own credibility, he's diminishing the Red Cross too. "It's a downward spiral," says Elisa Massimino, Washington director of Human Rights First. "If I'm the ICRC and I'm visiting [abused] prisoners in, say, Egypt, the Egyptians will say 'What are you going to do? The U.S. says this isn't torture.'"

Worse, if a dictator in some god-forsaken part of the world captures an American soldier, the U.S. may protest. But it is the Red Cross's assertions of a violation that will be the immediate point of pressure on the captors.

"What it virtually guaranteed is that dictatorships will cite the U.S. government's own arguments to defend themselves and that will make it harder for the ICRC and everyone else to condemn and shame those governments," says Tom Malinowski, a spokesman for Human Rights Watch.

Jon Swift essentially made the same point this week in his bitingly satirical way. In "the torture race," he argued, "we need to stay just one small step behind the enemy. "

If they ratchet up their interrogation techniques, we need to ratchet up ours, making sure that they always stay just a little bit more evil than us so that we can retain our moral superiority.

A few months ago in Salon, Gary Kamiya wrote that the Bush administration "is a lot of things" --

a secretive cabal, a cavalcade of incompetence, a blood-stained Church Militant, a bad rerun of "The Godfather" in which scary men in suits pay ominous visits to hospital rooms.

"Impeachment," he admitted, "is the logical solution." Likening Bush at the head of America to a "bad marriage," he pointed out that the head of the family turned out to be --

A complete dud. * * * Bush cheated on us, lied, besmirched our family's name and spent all our money, we the people, not to mention our elected representatives and the media, seem content to stick it out to the bitter end.

Why then, he asked, "was Clinton, who was never as unpopular as Bush, impeached for lying about sex, while Bush faces no sanction for the far more serious offense of lying about war?" Or, his torture orders for that matter?

For two interrelated reasons, Kamiya suggested. "The main reason is obvious: The Democrats think it's bad politics."

The truth is that Bush's high crimes and misdemeanors, far from being too small, are too great. What has saved Bush is the fact that his lies were, literally, a matter of life and death. They were about war. And they were sanctified by 9/11. Bush tapped into a deep American strain of fearful, reflexive bellicosity, which Congress and the media went along with for a long time and which has remained largely unexamined to this day. Congress, the media and most of the American people have yet to turn decisively against Bush because to do so would be to turn against some part of themselves. This doesn't mean we support Bush, simply that at some dim, half-conscious level we're too confused -- not least by our own complicity -- to work up the cold, final anger we'd need to go through impeachment. We haven't done the necessary work to separate ourselves from our abusive spouse. We need therapy -- not to save this disastrous marriage, but to end it.

"There is an immoral crime of the highest order being committed in America, and somebody is morally responsible," Third World Traveler said a month ago. We all are morally responsible unless we try to stop it.

Democrats in Congress are as morally responsible as the Republicans, unless they try to stop it. Judges on the bench are as morally responsible as the rest of us, unless they try to stop it. A mere handful of ordinary citizens and neighbors are as morally responsible as all the rest of us. As Christopher Dodd reminds us, that was the lesson his father and the allied powers taught at Nuremberg.

Because Bush's endorsement of torture, no matter what he claims otherwise, threatens to have lasting negative effects on the moral standing of the United States and the safety of everyone at risk here and abroad -- including our troops -- impeachment no longer should be viewed as "off the table," as Rep. Nancy Pelosi claimed. Scarecrow at Firedog Lake has it right:

Impeachment is the Constitutional remedy the Founders provided for exactly this disease. It should be attempted even if it fails, because it’s the right thing to do, and because we owe it to those who follow to say we tried and did not submit to this wrecking crew without a struggle.

There is no other way to break the circle of torture that has become the morally bankrupt policy adopted in America's name by George W. Bush.