The Day In Torture

by digby

Greenwald does the usual thorough job demolishing the fatuous arguments set forth by extremist right wing lawyers David Rivkin and Lee Casey to ensure that no one who ordered torture is ever held legally liable. (Perhaps if the vice president had been receiving fellatio as he ordered it, there might be a case.) He writes:

Does anyone deny that we are exactly the country that Walsh described: one where "powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office -- deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence"? And what rational person could think that's a desirable state of affairs that ought not only be preserved -- but fortified still further-- as we move now to immunize Bush 43 officials for their far more serious and disgraceful crimes? As the Rivkin/Casey oeuvre demonstrates, we've created a zone of lawlessness around our highest political leaders and either refuse to acknowledge that we've done that or, worse, have decided that we don't really mind.

Yes, but one simply doesn't hold people of good breeding liable for such unpleasantness. They suffer more than enough just by being socially embarrased by these inconvenient questions. Any punishment beyond that is completely disproportionate.

On the other hand, we just know that certain other people can't even be allowed a proper trial before we lock them up and throw away the key. Jane Mayer reports:

A number of national-security lawyers in both parties favor the creation of some new form of preventive detention. They do not believe that it is the President’s prerogative to lock “enemy combatants” up indefinitely, yet they fear that neither the criminal courts nor the military system is suited for the handling of transnational terrorists, whom they do not consider to be ordinary criminals or conventional soldiers. Instead, they suggest that Obama should work with Congress to write new laws, possibly creating a “national-security court,” which could order certain suspects to be held without a trial.

One proponent of this idea is Neal Katyal, whom Obama recently named to the powerful post of Principal Deputy Solicitor General, in the Justice Department. Katyal is best known for his victory as the lead counsel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006). In his first appearance before the Supreme Court, he persuaded a majority of the Justices to declare that the Guantánamo military-commission system was illegal, arguing that Congress had not authorized the commissions. Katyal’s new job is to represent the government before the Supreme Court. Given the sensitivity of this role, Katyal declined to comment for this story. But in October he posted an article on a Web site affiliated with Georgetown Law, in which he argued, “What is needed is a serious plan to prosecute everyone we can in regular courts, and a separate system to deal with the very small handful of cases in which patently dangerous people cannot be tried.”


All I can say is, thank goodness we have such big hearted and trustworthy people deciding which people are just too dangerous to be allowed their human rights or somebody might get the idea that the rule of law doesn't mean anything more than the paper its written on.

Read the whole thing. This is looking more and more like "don't ask don't try" -- except this is actually much worse than the don't ask don't tell policy. These people are being imprisoned indefinitely, which is the ultimate Kafkaesque nightmare.

I just don't get this. Is it really their feeling that these particular people are so much more dangerous than the many thousands of muslim extremists who are out there plotting as we speak? Are they so dangerous that it's worth it to give those same crazies a rallying cry, further compromise what little moral authority the US has left and tie our foreign policy up in knots?

Unless we've been teaching these people to make nuclear weapons down in Gitmo, the idea that they are too dangerous to take a chance on a trial is absurd. In fact, it's so absurd that one can't help but suspect that they don't want to try these people because to do so would expose some of the horrors that have been perpetrated by the US government --- which leads us right back to where we started.

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