TW3 — and tracking a rogue regime

That Was The Week That Was … incendiary. I don’t know what it is about using self-immolation for protest, but it seems barbaric to me. Primitive. Fire always shows up in Aries energy, eh?

Bonus is info on the newly released Yoo memo’s and destroyed CIA tapes. The two little, too late [2008/9] attempts to distance from this rogue MO mean nothing except the Bushies were worried about what came next.

Dubby had … as we followed carefully over the years … every intention of escalating tyranny into the Thirty Year Reign of the Republican party. The Happy Camps make obvious sense in light of Yoo’s vision of Posse Comitatus; we escaped that possible future by the skin of our teeth, dearhearts. When you think of the dreadful challenges we’ve been left with, thank God/dess that isn’t one of them.

Of note: Pelosi says go after ‘em … that’s new. We need Fitzgerald or somebody similar for a job like this; I don’t think a commission will give us what we want — case in point, The Warren Commission. Pfffft!

In these recent Rush daze, I’ve heard Pubs [including the Bloviator] mention the Constitution and it works me every time — I’d like to slap the word right off their lips, a little thank you for protecting it these last long years. NOT.

Jude

Harper’s Weekly Review

President Barack Obama addressed a joint session of
Congress, offering a broad outline of a massive spending
plan paired with $2 trillion in spending cuts over the
next decade. “Now is the time,” he said, “to jump-start
job creation, restart lending, and invest in areas like
energy, health care, and education.” It was announced that
General Motors lost $30.9 billion last year; that U.S. GDP
fell 6.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, exceeding
the officially predicted 3.8 percent drop, and even the
5.5 percent drop economists had expected; and that the
U.S. government will own up to 36 percent of
Citigroup. James Baker, Ronald Reagan’s Treasury
secretary, called on the Obama Administration to
nationalize America’s zombie banks. The Rocky Mountain
News ceased publication. Fifty-four percent of graduating
U.S. business majors lacked job offers, and Latham &
Watkins, an international law firm, planned to lay off 8
percent of its attorneys with six months’ severance (up to
$100,000 plus benefits) and to pay its recent law-school
hires up to $75,000 to defer work until late 2010. The
U.S. gave a further $30 billion to insurer A.I.G.
atop the $133 billion already doled out, and the
Dow fell below 7,000 for the first time since October
1997. The White House released a $3.6 trillion budget for
fiscal year 2010, calling for a $630 billion health-care
fund. “This budget,” said House Republican Leader John
Boehner (R., Ohio), “makes clear that the era of big
government is back.” Warren Buffet published his annual
letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. “The economy
will be in shambles throughout 2009,” he wrote, “and, for
that matter, probably well beyond.”

Many Americans were impressed by the supple firmness of
Michelle Obama’s upper arms. “This woman is redecorating
the White House, trying to raise two children, and
backseat-driving the nation,” said a 25-year-old woman who
watched the first lady on television, then went to an
Adidas store in New York City and bought two five-pound
dumbbells. “She seems to have time to keep her arms toned,
so why can’t I?” A rocket carrying the NASA Orbiting
Carbon Observatory, intended to track global warming,
crashed on launch. Hamas and Fatah held peace talks in
Cairo. President Barack Obama announced that he would pull
all combat troops out of Iraq by 2010, and asked Congress
for an extra $200 billion for the next eighteen months of
war. The Pentagon lifted the ban on photographing the
coffins of dead American soldiers. The number of priests
was rising, and HIV was evolving. Paul Harvey
died. California declared a state of drought
emergency. One hundred and fifty people applied, and ten
were hired, to wait tables at a topless coffeeshop in
Vassalboro, Maine. “People like nudity,” said owner Donald
Crabtree, “and coffee is profitable.”

Thieves stole up to 7 million euros from the Bank of
Ireland in Dublin, and Irish protesters demonstrated at
the ministry of finance against U2, which has relocated to
the Netherlands to avoid taxes on royalties. “I don’t need
to pay like you/No, I won’t pay like you/Because I still
haven’t learned about democracy,” sang one Bono
impersonator to the tune of “I Still Haven’t Found What
I’m Looking For.” British researchers identified the
oldest words in English as “I,” “we,” “two,” and “three,”
and predicted the death of “bad.” Three people in
Louisiana were arrested for attempting to swap two small
children for $175 and a cockatoo, and the principal of a
London school, charged with downloading child pornography,
skipped bail after undergoing treatment for a thyroid
condition. “Please warn officers that when he is arrested
he might be radioactive,” said a judge. “This is not a
joke.” A study of 1.3 million British women found that a
single drink per day increases the risk of cancer of the
breast, liver, and rectum. A fireman in Oklahoma was
arrested for starting small grass fires near his
firehouse, and a man in Boston was treated for burns after
he started a fire inside his car in an attempt to keep
warm. Three people with “personal grievances” set
themselves on fire in a car just outside of Tiananmen
Square (where soldiers stand next to fire extinguishers to
extinguish protesters), and in Sichuan province a Tibetan
monk named Tapey was shot by police after he set himself
ablaze. Ten people in Bloomingdale, Indiana, watched as a
58-year-old Wal-Mart employee, described by management as
“fun to be around,” set himself alight in a parking lot
near the store where he worked. People threw their coats
on the man, but he tossed the coats away; before
succumbing to burns he told police, “I just couldn’t take
it anymore.” The man’s son said that his father had
enjoyed living in the suburbs. “This had nothing to do
with the economy,” said the son. “We were getting ready to
redo the front lawn.”

– Paul Ford
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/03/WeeklyReview2009-03-03

bonus

George W. Bush’s Disposable Constitution
Scott Horton, Harpers
March 3, 09

Yesterday the Obama Administration released a series of nine previously secret legal opinions crafted by the Office of Legal Counsel to enhance the presidential powers of George W. Bush. Perhaps the most astonishing of these memos was one crafted by University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo. He concluded that in wartime, the President was freed from the constraints of the Bill of Rights with respect to anything he chose to label as a counterterrorism operations inside the United States.

Here’s Neil Lewis’s summary in the New York Times:

“The law has recognized that force (including deadly force) may be legitimately used in self-defense,” Mr. Yoo and Mr. Delahunty wrote to Mr. Gonzales. Therefore any objections based on the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches are swept away, they said, since any possible privacy offense resulting from such a search is a lesser matter than any injury from deadly force. The Oct. 23 memorandum also said that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.” It added that “the current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”

John Yoo’s Constitution is unlike any other I have ever seen. It seems to consist of one clause: appointing the President as commander-in-chief. The rest of the Constitution was apparently printed in disappearing ink.

We need to know how the memo was used. Bradbury suggests it was not much relied upon; I don’t believe that for a second. Moreover Bradbury’s decision to wait to the very end before repealing it suggests that someone in the Bush hierarchy was keen on having it.

It’s pretty clear that it served several purposes. Clearly it was designed to authorize sweeping warrantless surveillance by military agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. Using special new surveillance programs that required the collaboration of telecommunications and Internet service providers, these agencies were sweeping through the emails, IMs, faxes, and phone calls of tens of millions of Americans. Clearly such unlawful surveillance occurred. But the language of the memos suggest that much more was afoot, including the deployment of military units and military police powers on American soil. These memos suggest that John Yoo found a way to treat the Posse Comitatus Act as suspended.

These memos gave the President the ability to authorize the torture of persons held at secret overseas sites. And they dealt in great detail with the plight of Jose Padilla, an American citizen seized at O’Hare Airport. Padilla was accused of being involved in a plot to make and detonate a “dirty bomb,” but at trial it turned out that the Bush Administration had no evidence to stand behind its sensational accusations. Evidently it was just fine to hold Padilla incommunicado, deny him access to counsel and torture him-in the view of the Bush OLC lawyers, that is.

Among these memos was one for the files from Steven Bradbury, whom the Senate refused to confirm to run OLC, but who continued as a squatter in the position through the end of the Bush Administration. In his memo, the self-styled OLC head rejected a series of John Yoo-authored memos, noting the painfully obvious reasons why they were incorrect (for instance, Yoo’s penchant for misquoting the Constitution). He did this on January 15, 2009-as he was clearing his desk and preparing to hunt for a new job. So why did he leave the ridiculous Yoo memos in place until the last possible second? Michael Isikoff furnishes a very plausible analysis on MSNBC: [Open link for video.]

We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it. ++

Bush’s executive tyranny
We need a citizens commission to investigate how far the Bush White House wanted to take executive power after 9/11.
Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times
March 4, 2009

Just how close to the brink of executive tyranny did the United States come in the panic that swept George W. Bush’s administration after 9/11? The answer, it now seems clear, is that we came far closer than even staunch critics of the White House believed.

On Monday, the Obama administration released nine legal opinions produced for the Bush White House by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That heretofore obscure office essentially serves as the president’s arbiter of what’s legal and what isn’t. Among other things, the memorandums issued by the office in 2001 asserted that Bush had the power to order the military to capture suspected terrorists on U.S. soil and to treat them as enemy combatants without any rights to due process.

In the course of such operations, according to the Office of Legal Counsel, the military was free to ignore 4th Amendment prohibitions on illegal search and seizure and to engage in warrantless wiretapping. 1st Amendment protections of free speech also could be suspended at the chief executive’s directive, according to these opinions, and the president has the power to abrogate any international treaty at will.

Other opinions asserted that the president, acting under his inherent powers as commander in chief, is free to ignore laws passed by Congress and cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, particularly on the treatment of “detainees.”

An opinion sent to the White House on Oct. 23, 2001, flatly stated that 1st Amendment “speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully. … The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.” Less than a year later, this same office advised Bush that he was free to authorize the torture of suspected terrorists.

These opinions were largely the work of John Yoo — the UC Berkeley legal scholar who currently is a visiting professor at Chapman University School of Law in Orange County — and a relatively small cadre of like-minded conservative lawyers. Many were passionate advocates of a marginal constitutional theory called “unitary executive,” which holds that — when it comes to matters of national security — the president is free to exercise virtually unfettered powers as an inherent aspect of his constitutional duty to act as commander in chief.

Suffice it to say that the arguments and precedents marshaled on behalf of this notion about the balance of powers give new weight to the adjective “attenuated.” In fact, what comes most readily to mind is the style of Talmudic argument called pilpul, in which texts and precedents are tortured out of context to arrive at a predetermined conclusion.

That, however, never bothered then-Vice President Dick Cheney and his ally, then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who brought to the Bush administration an abiding conviction that, since the Ford administration in which they both had served, U.S. presidents had suffered a disastrous erosion of executive power. Though neither man is a lawyer, both had become enthusiastic proponents of the unitary executive theory during their years out of power.

What Cheney and Rumsfeld understood better than most was that a few well-placed zealots with hands on critical levers — such as those in the Office of Legal Counsel — can send even the federal government spinning in new directions.

They came perilously close to doing that in the frantic and fearful months after 9/11, though the record must reflect that their first and firmest opponents were other conservative lawyers who found what was being proposed horrifying. Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel after Yoo was gone and who repudiated many of the office’s earlier opinions, was one of those. So too was then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, nobody’s idea of a civil libertarian.

Understanding how all this occurred, as well as how the CIA came to destroy 92 videotapes of the torture and incarceration it carried out under the authority of the Yoo memos, is vital. The problem is that ordinary congressional hearings would inevitably be attacked as partisan. And we don’t need a witch-hunt or a series of prosecutions of CIA officers who were following orders they’d been told were based on legal opinions from the Department of Justice.

That’s why Congress should take up the suggestion of Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and establish a bipartisan citizens commission to investigate and report on exactly what occurred. We need to understand just how close fear and over- weening ambition took us to executive tyranny. ++

CIA in Mass Destruction of Torture Evidence
Scott Horton, Harpers
March 2, 09

In a letter to the federal judge overseeing Freedom of Information Act litigation in New York, Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin drops a bombshell. The CIA purposefully destroyed nearly 100 tapes of interrogation sessions involving prisoners in its custody. The Associated Press reports:

“The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed,” said the letter by Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin. “Ninety two videotapes were destroyed.” The tapes became a contentious issue in the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, after prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then acknowledged two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.

The letter, dated March 2 to Judge Alvin Hellerstein, says the CIA is now gathering more details for the lawsuit, including a list of the destroyed records, any secondary accounts that describe the destroyed contents, and the identities of those who may have viewed or possessed the recordings before they were destroyed. But the lawyers also note that some of that information may be classified, such as the names of CIA personnel that viewed the tapes.

You can examine the Dassin letter here [open link.]

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, a man who has spoken openly of his own personal fear of criminal investigation and prosecution emerging from his stewardship of intelligence-gathering operations, defended the previously disclosed destruction by asserting that it had been done in accordance with law.

But in what legal system is it proper for the target of an investigation to destroy evidence of crimes? Torture is a criminal act, and the tapes most likely captured evidence of crimes. This evidence would also have been critical for purposes of assessing the reliability of confessions or other information secured from persons who were tortured. The evidence was sought in the New York FOIA litigation and in other court cases, and it would have been essential for any prosecution of the persons covered. But more importantly, it would serve as essential evidence in the forthcoming prosecutions of the Bush Administration torture conspirators.

A Department of Justice investigation is now underway into CIA destruction of evidence.

But at this point we have every reason to suspect Justice Department complicity in the schemes, especially given reports that approval for the destruction was sought through legal channels. The Justice Department made false representations to at least one court on this subject already (as the AP report noted), and given the obsession with secrecy that has crept into the new administration, it’s very difficult to credit statements coming out of the Justice Department on the subject.

This news makes the case for an independent commission of inquiry still more
compelling. It also builds the case for a special prosecutor to look into matters surrounding torture. The new prosecutor must be a person of stature and gravity on a par with the attorney general himself, must be seen as above the political fray, and must be given the resources and manpower to fully investigate the affair-including the increasingly obvious role played by the Justice Department.

There is one inescapable conclusion to draw from the destruction of evidence here: those who destroyed it fully appreciated it could be offered up as evidence of crimes in which they were implicated in a future prosecution. ++

The End of the Yoo Doctrine
JB, Balkinization
Tuesday, March 03, 2009

The Office of Legal Counsel has just released a series of previously secret opinions from the Bush Administration. Perhaps equally important, it has issued two remarkable opinions, one from October 6th, 2008 and one from January 15th, 2009 which essentially disown the extreme theories of Presidential power offered during the crucial period between 2001 and 2003 when John Yoo was at the OLC.

These two memos were issued in the last days of the Bush Administration and they bear the signature of Steven G. Bradbury, the Acting OLC head from 2005 to 2009 and who wrote memos justifying many of the Bush Administration’s detention and interrogation practices after the original torture memos were revealed and disowned. These two memos from October 2008 and January 2009 do not reverse the OLC’s views about the legality of specific interrogation, detention and surveillance practices. What they do is to announce that the theories used to justify these practices are no longer taken seriously at the OLC and that executive branch officials should not rely on them.

The October 6, 2008 memo disowns Yoo’s secret October 25, 2001 memo which stated that if the government used the military to fight terrorism inside the United States, (1) the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures would not apply to limit domestic military operations, (2) that the First Amendment’s guarantees of speech and press might have to be subordinated to military necessity, (3) that the Posse Comitatus Act, which makes it illegal to use of the military for domestic law enforcement purposes, would not apply.

The January 15th memo is even more striking. It disowns statements made in a number of OLC memos (mostly authored by Yoo) made in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. It attempts to excuse these statements on the grounds that the OLC memos were issued under extraordinary circumstances and it notes that, in contrast to usual OLC practice, these memos offer broad hypothetical statements rather than responding to concrete situations. The January 15, 2009 memo insists that the OLC has not relied on these disowned statements of law since 2003.

First, the January 2009 OLC memo disowns the claim, made in several OLC memos, including the infamous torture memos, that the President has the sole power to decide on conditions of detention and interrogation of captured individuals and that any attempt by Congress to to interfere or regulate what the President does with persons he captures or detains (for example, through a ban on torture or an attempt to regulate military commissions) would be unconstitutional.

Second, the January 2009 OLC memo disowns the statement in previous memos that FISA should be interpreted as not restraining the President’s ability to engage in warrantless domestic surveillance in order to avoid a potential conflict with the President’s powers under Article II. These memos argued in effect that FISA would be unconstitutional to the extent that it prevented the President from disobeying its limitations on domestic surveillance.

These two disowned claims lie at the heart of the Cheney/Addington/Yoo theory of presidential power– namely, that when the president acts as commander in chief Congress may not restrict in any way his military decisionmaking, including decisions about detention, interrogation, and surveillance. The President, because he is President, may do whatever he thinks is necessary, even in the domestic context, if he acts for military and national security reasons in his capacity as Commander in Chief. This theory of presidential power argues, in essence, that when the President acts in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, he may make his own rules and cannot be bound by Congressional laws to the contrary. This is a theory of presidential dictatorship.

These views are outrageous and inconsistent with basic principles of the Constitution as well as with two centuries of legal precedents. Yet they were the basic assumptions of key players in the Bush Administration in the days following 9/11.

The January15, 2009 memo offers various reasons why these conclusions are incorrect and why they fail to take into account an abundance of legal materials– including the text of the Constitution itself, which gives Congress the powers to regulate captures. All this might seem to suggest that the previous OLC memos were badly thought out and badly reasoned. Interestingly, however, the January 15, 2009 memo drops a footnote saying that neither this memo nor the October 6, 2008 memo “is intended to suggest in any way that the attorneys involved in the preparation of the opinions in question did not satisfy all applicable standards of professional responsibility.”

The October 2008 and January 2009 memos are the Bush OLC’s way of distancing itself from its conduct during the period when John Yoo was at OLC and when the Cheney/Addington/Yoo theory reigned supreme. It is important to recognize that these two memos are largely concerned with disowning particular broad claims of constitutional law, and they do not disown any of the Bush Administration’s specific policies regarding surveillance, detention, and interrogation. Indeed, after John Yoo left the OLC the Bush OLC was able to justify many of these policies without the Cheney/Addington/Yoo theory, by arguing for example, that applicable legislation should be read very narrowly or that Congress had authorized what the Bush Administration wanted to do in the September 18, 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. No one should confuse these memos with a reversal of Bush Administration policy– instead, they are an attempt to disown a particular theory of unlimited Presidential power that was an embarrassment to the professional standards of the OLC. In this sense what is remarkable about these two memos is not that they change any concrete practices but that the OLC felt the need to reverse itself years later and to disavow a particular type of reasoning– reasoning which sought, in secret, to justify a theory of Presidential dictatorship. ++

Appoint a Special Prosecutor
David Swanson, Smirking Chimp
March 3, 2009

Organizations Agree With Leading Senators and Congress Members: The Crimes of Bush, Cheney, and Other Top Officials Must Be Prosecuted

Statement on Prosecution of Former High Officials

We urge Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a non-partisan independent Special Counsel to immediately commence a prosecutorial investigation into the most serious alleged crimes of former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the attorneys formerly employed by the Department of Justice whose memos sought to justify torture, and other former top officials of the Bush Administration.

Our laws, and treaties that under Article VI of our Constitution are the supreme law of the land, require the prosecution of crimes that strong evidence suggests these individuals have committed. Both the former president and the former vice president have confessed to authorizing a torture procedure that is illegal under our law and treaty obligations.

The former president has confessed to violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

We see no need for these prosecutions to be extraordinarily lengthy or costly, and no need to wait for the recommendations of a panel or “truth” commission when substantial evidence of the crimes is already in the public domain. We believe the most effective investigation can be conducted by a prosecutor, and we believe such an investigation should begin immediately.

DRAFTED BY The Robert Jackson Steering Committee, SIGNED BY the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, the Society of American Law Teachers, Human Rights USA, After Downing Street, American Freedom Campaign, and a total of 142 organizations listed at http://prosecutebushcheney.org

NANCY PELOSI agrees:

“Senator Leahy has a proposal, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is a good idea. What I have some concern about though is it has immunity. And I think that some of the issues involved here, like the services part, politicizing of the Justice Department, and the rest, they have criminal ramifications, and I don’t think we should be giving them immunity. No one is above the law. The president has said that. [ ... you would support a referral for a criminal investigation, potential prosecution?] Absolutely. No one is above the law.”
– Feb. 25, 2009.

JERROLD NADLER agrees:

“We have no choice. We must prosecute.”
– Feb. 18, 2009.

JACK REED agrees:

“I think we have to seriously investigate allegations of torture. I don’t know if we require a formal new Commission to do that. We have the DOJ. We have Federal attorneys. But we cannot simply ignore credible allegations.”
– Feb. 12, 2009.

RUSS FEINGOLD agrees:

“As President Obama and Attorney General Holder have said, nobody is above the law. There needs to be accountability for wrongdoing by the Bush Administration, including the illegal warrantless wiretapping and interrogation programs. We cannot simply sweep these assaults on the rule of law under the rug.”
– Feb. 10, 2009.

SHELDON WHITEHOUSE agrees:

“Whitehouse said the Justice Department should probe the matter. He pointed out that the agency has long regarded waterboarding as torture and, back in the 1980s, prosecuted a Texas sheriff in the 1980s for using waterboarding to extract confessions from suspects. Simply fixing the law around a policy does not make it legal, Whitehouse added.
– February 2009, http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/39495

ANTONIO TAGUBA agrees:

“There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
– February 2009.

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE agree:

criminal investigation 38%
independent panel 24%
neither 34%
USA Today / Gallup Jan 30 - Feb 1, 2009.

THE NINTH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS agrees:

On Feb. 27, 2009, it rejected an attempt by the Obama administration to use the state secrets privilege to block a lawsuit concerning the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program.

TORTURERS’ OWN LAWYERS agree:

“Once Holder said that [waterboarding is torture] I got nervous,” said one lawyer who represents a CIA official involved in the interrogation program, who asked not to be identified talking about a legally sensitive matter. “If he says it was torture, he has to do something.”
– Newsweek, January 2009.

JOHN CONYERS agrees:

“The new administration should conduct an independent criminal probe into whether any laws were broken in connection with these activities. Just this week, in the pages of this newspaper, a Guantanamo Bay official acknowledged that a suspect there had been “tortured” — her exact word — in apparent violation of the law. The law is the law, and, if criminal conduct occurred, those responsible — particularly those who ordered and approved the violations — must be held accountable.”
– Jan. 23, 2009.

CARL LEVIN agrees:

“I suggested to Eric Holder . that he select some people or hire an outside person who’s got real credibility, perhaps a retired federal judge, to take all the available information, and there’s reams of it. Look, the Vice President, the former Vice President of the United States, acknowledged that they engaged in torture. He says that waterboarding’s not torture, he’s wrong. Waterboarding is torture, period. And this administration and Eric Holder has said so. It’s torture and there’s other forms that they engaged in, so what needs to be done, I believe, in addition to finishing the investigation, is for the Attorney General, the new Attorney General, to identify some people in his office to take the existing documentation. The acknowledgment, folks, this is not a very difficult - this is almost like a case in court with an agreed upon statement of facts, that the previous administration acknowledges that they engaged in waterboarding, period.”
– Jan. 22, 2009.

MANFRED NOWAK agrees:

The incoming American President Barack Obama is legally obligated to prosecute Bush and Rumsfeld because the US has ratified the UN Convention on Torture and has also recognized it as legally binding, said UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak.
– Jan. 20, 2009.

ERIC HOLDER agrees:

At Holder’s confirmation hearing, when Senator Patrick Leahy asked if waterboarding is torture and illegal, Holder agreed that it is. When Leahy then asked whether the President of the United States can immunize acts of torture, Holder said that he cannot. When Senator Diane Feinstein said that an Inspector General’s report on politicized hiring, firing, and prosecuting at the Department of Justice is evidence that officials have lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and that doing so is illegal, Holder replied that he will review prosecutors’ determination not to pursue criminal charges. When Senator Orrin Hatch asked if the president has the authority to engage in warrantless surveillance, Holder said no. When Senator Russ Feingold asked the same thing, Holder stammered and stuttered and called it a “hypothetical” but said no. When Feingold pointed out that lawyers at the Department of Justice, the White House, and the Office of the Vice President had written memos that clearly sought to sanction illegal actions, and asked “What is your view of the President’s Constitutional authority to authorize violations of the law?” Holder replied that the president does not have that authority.

56 MEMBERS OF CONGRESS agree:

“Dear Mr. Attorney General:
“We are writing to request that you appoint a special counsel to investigate whether the Bush Administration’s policies regarding the interrogation of detainees have violated federal criminal laws. There is mounting evidence that the Bush Administration has sanctioned enhanced interrogation techniques against detainees under the control of the United States that warrant an investigation.”
– June 6, 2008, http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/39727

DICK DURBIN agrees:

On February 12, 2008, Senators Durbin and Whitehouse wrote a letter to the Department of Justice requesting an investigation into the role “Justice Department officials [played] in authorizing and/or overseeing the use of waterboarding by the Central Intelligence Agency… and whether those who authorized it violated the law.” The two senators wrote: “Waterboarding has a sordid history in the annals of torture by repressive regimes, from the Spanish Inquisition to the Khmer Rouge. The United States has always repudiated waterboarding as a form of torture and prosecuted it as a war crime.” ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.” ~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

1 comment March 5th, 2009