Comments on: Torture

By: Crazy for Urban Planning

Crazy for Urban Planning — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:47:54 +0000

I’ve thought about this issue a little longer and must add how dangerous it is. We seem to have some 30 – 40% of Americans who simply can not process or comprehend complex information. They have become a subservent to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the rest of the noise machine. Anything written or broadcasted in the media is simply dismissed as “liberal.” Look at some issues: global warming is a “hoax” on the part of profiteering liberal scientists (I don’t understand the profiteering part); health care, we can’t have the government “run” health care, thats socialism (the incredible fact that perhaps that leaves 20% of us with no health care doesn’t get mentioned); gun control, the government can’t resrict our right to bear arms anywhere, regardless of the number of people murdered on our streets every day. This is just off the top of my head, but the point is problems exist in America today and these folks have disabled our system of government by using opinions as fact. Its dangerous!

By: BruceH

BruceH — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 03:48:12 +0000

AnonymousLiberal does make and excellent point. I do not know if I agree with it or not, but it is certainly a valid argument.

I do disagree, however, that prosecutions must start at the top. Historically, many high ranking people have been brought to justice by first convicting those below them. If the Justice Department can secure a few low level convictions or plea bargains, then it will be much easier to prosecute those above them.

By: erinyes

erinyes — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 23:00:18 +0000

This is an interesting discussion, especially in light of the impending deportation of an 80 something former nazi prison guard who is retired from the UAW(American citizen!).
If it was up to me, I’d say leave the old man alone and deport all the heads of the Bush administration and fire every CIA and military officer involved… and jerk their retirements. I hope bezelbub has a special devil put aside for ‘Berto, Rummy, Cheney,and Feith.
As for Dubya, his hell is observing the shit pile he created.
May he live in interesting times.
I recall visiting a ’site called “the CIA’s greatest hits”, what an eye opener.

By: Sachem

Sachem — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 22:15:31 +0000

I disagree that this should be a top down prosecution. Rather, this is a classic RICO prosecution, and as such we have to work from the captains and capos on up. I certainly hope that the CIA officials who won’t be prosecuted will be providing evidence in one form or another.

Let’s be clear about the obvious. Bybee and Yoo were producing a product. These opinions were absurd. They were following Addington’s instructions.

Cheney’s office was a criminal organization operating under the guise of “policy decisions”.

By: Bonnie

Bonnie — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 22:05:34 +0000

I think going after the top gang; e.g., Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, is the first step in prosecution. And, if people think these scumbag attorneys shouldn’t be prosecuted, the very least that should be done is that they all get disbarred. Bybee is a Federal Judge; Yoo teaches law–neither should be allowed to earn a living in these fields. But, we cannot go forward without holding these people accountable. Last night, Keith Olbermann showed all the instances of what goes wrong when you tried to move forward without having accountability.

As a former 31-year Federal Government employee (non-CIA), we have always had the rule that if we were asked to do anything illegal or immoral, we could refuse and not be considered insubordinate. I should think that went for any CIA employee, too.

By: uncledad

uncledad — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 19:22:23 +0000

Seems to me that anonymous liberal has it right. It’s pretty obvious that these memo’s were written for two reasons, 1-to answer questions of legality by the CIA interrogators, 2-to provide legal cover for the Bu$hco leadership. I think they effectively accomplished both, so the only people left for prosecution are the lawyers who misrepresented the law.

By: Dave S

Dave S — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:13:49 +0000

“Just following orders” was, in fact, not a valid defense at Nuremberg. But remember that they only prosecuted 207 people at those trials; 22 at the first War Criminals trials, and 185 in a series of follow-on trials (cite: Wikipedia). There were a lot of others, probably tens of thousands, who “just followed orders” as well; Nuremberg went after their leaders. I don’t see any conflict with the Nuremberg principles in granting reasonable immunity for the guys in the field, if they in fact depended on and followed the guidance given by OLC.

Bybee? Yoo? Addington? They need to spend a good many years in a very small, secure room, pondering their hideous acts.

By: Swami

Swami — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:05:50 +0000

I like to think that the Obama administration is laying the ground work to prosecute the ones responsible for implementing torture by way of executive directive. Namely Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and Rumsfeld. The lawyers who provided the legal justifications will get away clean because they only provided an opinion as to the legality of what methods were used.

When you think back to Rumsfeld with his euphemisms of “enhanced” interrogations you have to know he was describing torture.. and he knew it!

But whatever, Obama now has the problem of dealing with the torture issue now that his Justice Dept has officially classified what transpired in the interrogations as torture.

Another valid point brought up by the International court of jurists( or whatever the organization is) is the question of how do you restore the rule of law if you do not honor the rule of law by prosecuting those who break the law?

I guess we can just kick it down the road for the Palin administration to deal with.

By: LongHairedWeirdo

LongHairedWeirdo — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:55:36 +0000

I agree that “just following orders” is not a defense, but there comes a time when orders must be presumed legal, as well, unless they are unreasonable on their face.

Given the circumstances, I think we have to give a pass to the CIA agents who followed orders *if* they kept to the instructions they were given, and if they were reasonable in not stacking methods until it was obvious and clear that they were torture. Because that’s the ugly part of all of this: they wanted to skirt the line of torture, and make it look like it wasn’t quite torture. That was the entire game they were playing, was how to make it look legal.

By: joanr16

joanr16 — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:21:01 +0000

Gulag, I’m pretty skeptical that Obama’s afraid the CIA would harm him (or his family) physically, but as you say, it’s not impossible. I remember the Church Hearings of the mid-1970s, when we opened the Pandora’s strongbox of the CIA, and out flew all manner of unthinkable horrors that had been piling up for decades. But that hasn’t been the state of the agency since. Dubya derided and blamed the CIA every chance he got, and the agency (with the exception of Ms. Plame) just took it. If the agency was still capable of “going rogue,” as they say in the movies, I think at the very least Dubya would be missing some of his digits. Possibly from “an accident cutting brush on the ranch.” He behaved like a snotty young punk toward the CIA, and they have a long history of antagonism toward snotty young punks (see: JFK and the Bay of Pigs, not a J.K. Rowling novel). And I don’t think the agency went easy on Dubya because his poppy ran the place during the bad old days. The old CIA hands who worked for Poppy Bush are long gone.

As for the political-survival question, I can certainly get behind this, but I think it extends beyond the agency itself– to Congress, the Pentagon, the NSA, the FBI, and the centrist voters who chose Obama over Doofy McLoser last November. We progressives still may shudder when we hear the letters “CIA,” but many anti-Bush people rose to the agency’s defense over the past eight years.

justme makes a good point, too, that Obama and the DoJ may not want to go after the “good Germans just following orders” (yet) because the “good Germans” then will just shut down and make it impossible to sort out what all went on during our post-9/11 torture spree.