Cracking Khalid
“Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
George Orwell’s truth comes to mind as one reads that Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to go after the “rough men” who, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night, went too far in frightening Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the engineer of the September massacres.
Yet it seems now indisputable that those CIA interrogators, with their rough methods, got vital intelligence that saved American lives, as Dick Cheney has consistently contended.
According to the Washington Times, which reviewed the newly declassified CIA documents, those interrogators “produced life-saving intelligence that disrupted numerous terrorist plots.”
They elicited the names of al-Qaida agents who planned anthrax attacks on Westerners and a massive bombing of Camp Lemonier, the U.S. base in East Africa. They got the names of 70 recruits al-Qaida deemed “suitable for Western attacks” and of the men who made the bomb used on the U.S. consulate in Karachi.
Iyman Faris, an al-Qaeda sleeper agent and truck driver in Ohio, is serving 20 years because of information the CIA got from KSM and associates. Other operations aborted include al-Qaida “plots to fly airliners into buildings on the West Coast, setting off bombs in U.S. cities and planning to employ a network of Pakistanis to target gas stations, railroad tracks and the Brooklyn Bridge.”
What were the “inhumane” techniques CIA interrogators used to uncover these plans for the mass murder of Americans?
“Interrogators lifted one detainee off the floor by his arms, while they were bound behind his back with a belt,” reports the Washington Post. “Another interrogator used a stiff brush to clean a detainee, scrubbing so roughly that his legs were raw with abrasions. Another squeezed a detainee’s neck at his carotid artery until he began to pass out.”
The CIA, we are told, used mock executions to frighten captives and threatened to kill KSM’s children and rape his mother. Power drills were brandished in interrogation rooms.
Were any children killed? No. Was anyone’s mother raped? No. Was the power drill used? No.
Was anyone executed in front of a witness to make him talk? No. It was faked, as Sean Connery faked it in “The Untouchables” to get an underling to blab to Eliot Ness, aka Kevin Costner, about how he could take down Al Capone’s mob.
As for threatening to kill the children of our enemies, we did not do that in “The Good War.” Instead, what we did was kill them in the thousands every night in air raids over Germany and Japan.
In the Tokyo firestorm of February 1945, the Dresden raid in March, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, we killed grandparents, mothers, fathers, wives, sisters, daughters and sons of the enemy in the scores of thousands on each of those days.
Can it be that the same United States that honored Col. Paul Tibbets and put his Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, on display in its Air and Space Museum is going to prosecute a CIA agent for faking an execution and threatening, but never intending, to kill the children of Khalid Sheik Muhammad?
Why is Barack Obama allowing these prosecutions to proceed?
In 2004, career lawyers at Justice looked over the same reports and concluded that prosecutions would not serve the national interest. Obama has himself said he wants to move on.
Now, he and Holder may not like what was done back then, but who does? And where is the criminal intent? These agents are not sadists. They were trying to get intel to abort plots and apprehend terrorists to prevent them from killing us. And they succeeded. Not a single terrorist attack on the United States in eight years.
Do we the people, some of whom may be alive because of what those CIA men did, want them disgraced, prosecuted and punished for not going strictly by the book in protecting us from terrorists?
In its lead editorial Tuesday, “Following the Torture Trail,” theWashington Post declaims, “The real culprits in this sordid story are the higher-ups, starting with former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Richard Cheney who led America down the degraded path of state-sponsored torture.”
But why is Obama yielding to the clamor of a left that will not be satiated until Cheney and Bush are indicted as Class A war criminals? Is that in the national interest? Is it in Obama’s interest to tear his country apart to expose and punish these CIA agents?
In the 1960s, Robert Kennedy and the boys at Justice set up a “Get Hoffa Squad” to take down Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. It was a vendetta that succeeded.
This vendetta will not. For, on the issue of national security, as Barack will painfully discover, he is not more trusted than Dick Cheney or the rough men at the CIA who did the harsh interrogations of terrorists, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night.
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
Can it be that the same United States that honored Col. Paul Tibbets and put his Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, on display in its Air and Space Museum is going to prosecute a CIA agent for faking an execution and threatening, but never intending, to kill the children of Khalid Sheik Muhammad?
Hopefully.
I think mere dismissal would probably suffice, along with public recriminations for the elected officials who ok’d it, but if it’s going to be prosecution, then that’s what it will be.
America’s rough men, if they follow the Constitution, don’t use torture to get results. The odds of a terrorist attack are so small, and the certainty of absolute power corrupting so total, that I suspect I’ll sleep far better at night if that document is adhered to and Buchanan’s complaint ignored.
Re spoofing interrogation spoofs, few people know that ordinary police detectives can, and do, make up stories and essentially trick people in custody into making confessions and divulging information. The courts have upheld this tactic for “We the People,” but it’s too tough for terrorists?
BTW. In the Untouchables Connery’s character shoots an already dead gangster to simulate an execution. This is illegal ie. defacing a corpse. I suppose the movie judge let him off.
What bothers me about this issue is my pretty strong degree of confidence that if the terrorism that we had been subject to had been ratcheted up to some certain level no-one would be kvetching. Some certain additional anthrax attacks with mass results and clear links to foreign forces, a poisoning of this or that city’s water supply, lots of even small bombings at sporting events or theaters or malls and anyone who *opposed* the use of the CIA’s methods here would be laughed at if not howled down.
That’s not to say that Bush/Cheney authorizing what they did was necessarily reasonable or smart; recognizing the reality noted above it’s obviously a relative thing and thus always a matter of judgment assessing the circumstances. And I’d agree they probably went overboard given what the circumstance they faced. But I at least don’t like the unctousness that accompanies some of the attacks on them by people who pretend that they would never ever approve of any rough methods.
The fact is that many of these types of allegedly horrified folks are the same ones who loved the idea of the U.S. going into Iraq for no reason where thousands if not tens of thousands of essentially innocent Iraqis were sure to be killed and maimed. And the types who either stood silent or actually facilitated things like Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Beirut or, more lately, its scattering of some one million anti-personnel bomblets over Southern Lebanon.
That said I’m not sure that merely because a Bonfire of Hypocrisies inevitably accompanies this issue it follows that no investigation whatsoever ought to be conducted. But if the higher-ups aren’t going to be prosecuted it’s obscene to just whack the lower-downs. So maybe just some sort of non-prosecutorial thing is the better idea. (Unless of course it’s shown that someone went way way beyond the line of reasonableness.) Just recognize the moral complexity involved and get the facts out so the country can assess them into the future and hopefully grope its way towards some non-hypocritical sensibility on the issue.
Cheers,
With all due respect to PJB, it is not by any means clear from the report as it was released in a redacted form that coercive techniques produced any useful information that would not have been obtained by other means. Nor is there any real evidence that the al-Qaeda plots he refers to were much more than fantasies. The Bush Administration gave the green light to torture, something that the United States should not entertain under any circumstances if only because it is illegal and because Washington is a signatory to international agreements banning it. Yes, a country that safely bombs civilians from thirty thousand feet and yet will not bang someone against a wall to obtain a confession is engaging in hypocrisy, but institutionalizing barbarity is not a solution to the terrorism problem. Nor does it make us any safer, quite the contrary.
Has anyone else noticed that Pat seems to have lost his mind ever since Sarah Palin came on the scene?
Americans may trust our boys at the CIA with our security more than Obama, but never Cheney.
“George Orwell’s truth comes to mind as one reads that Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to go after the “rough men” who, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night”
I for one do not “sleep peacefully” knowing that our government – which eavesdrops on our communications a la the KGB, which clomps around the globe slaughtering civilians by the tens of thousands and which is no longer constrained by the Rule of Law or accountable to the people – has *torture chambers* at the ready.
I should think any American who believes in the (small-r) republican ideals of the founders feels the same way.
The Constitution does not offer protection to KSM, nor any other non-citizen. We should have no inhibition at doing anything-yes, anything-to such individuals and their families, simply because they exist.Seeing KSM’s offsprings’ charred corpses dangling for a tree limb, a fat pork chop in each mouth, would have shown seriousness about exterminating the operatives of the philosophy of filth and failure, er, religion of peace; just as important, the leeches amoungst the West who also belong to the same philosophy would realize they need to decamp to a land where their depraved philosophy holds sway, else they might meet a similar fate.
“George Orwell’s truth comes to mind as one reads that Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to go after the “rough men” who, to keep us sleeping peacefully at night, went too far in frightening Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the engineer of the September massacres”
This is what the Left means when they use the word “Fascist” to describe (what now passes for) the Right: this servile, almost erotic love and religious worship of Authority.
“Yet it seems now indisputable that those CIA interrogators, with their rough methods, got vital intelligence that saved American lives, as Dick Cheney has consistently contended.”
Yes – a CIA report insists that CIA interrogators who tortured gained valuable intelligence. But it does not conclude that this intelligence was garnered *through torture*, and – also – it is from the CIA themselves, who can hardly be said to be impartial or even remotely reliable.
In the end, though, whether torture works is entirely beside the point. Americans by definition reject torture and totalitarianism – even though we understand that having a torture chambers and totalitarianism may be “safer” in some sense.
“What were the “inhumane” techniques CIA interrogators used”
We wrung confessions from people by freezing them into hypothermia, by hanging them from shackles until their shoulders dislocated, by beating them with rifle butts, by threatening to blow their brains out, by subjecting them to water torture – some times scores and even hundreds of times, by threatening to rape their wives and daughters, by choking them until they passed out, and – in over a hundred cases – by torturing them *to death*. And keep in mind that many of these people were captured far from any battlefield, and that many were later determined to be innocent of wrongdoing and set free.
I hope fans of Pat Buchanan take note of the sort of powers he believes it appropriate for our federal government to seize and wield with impunity – with no accountability, in violation of the law. Indeed, this article is an explicit argument for lawlessness, for totalitarianism – for government bound by no laws, while we – the American people – are subject to the harshest and least forgiving criminal justice system in the world.
“Why is Barack Obama allowing these prosecutions to proceed?”
Because our laws and treaties *compel* him to do so. The Convention Against Torture – signed by Reagan – states:
“Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction”
“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
“An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture. . . .”
“Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture”
Obama has *no choice* – he is *compelled by law* to investigate and prosecute:
“The State Party in territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found, shall in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.”
One may argue that our President, like a medieval King or contemporary totalitarian Dictator, should be omnipotent and free to violate our laws, our Constitution. But if one believes in the Rule of Law and the republican ideals of the Founders one must recognize that torture is illegal, and that our president is *compelled* by our own laws, enacted through the people’s representatives, to investigate and prosecute allegations of torture. Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture so that it would “clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.
“The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called “universal jurisdiction.” Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”
In one fell swoop Pat Buchanan rejects the ideals of the Founding Fathers *and* Ronald Reagan, who – according to Pat Buchanan – faced a threat (the Soviet Empire) during his time in office that *dwarfed* the one we face now from these cave-dwelling primitives.
TomB raises an interesting point by mentioning the 2001 anthrax attacks. In 2002, the FBI was turning the life of Dr. Stephen Hatfill, a ‘person of interest,’ into a living hell. He was subsequently cleared, but not until after being personally and professionally destroyed. Imagine if you will if the Bureau had be able to use on him the methods that were used on Jose Padilla, another American citizen. It’s likely Hatfill would have ‘confessed’ to the anthrax attacks and any number of other crimes as well. And I concur, it makes no sense to prosecute the low-level CIA and military personnel, and not the high officials who authorized these methods.
“In one fell swoop Pat Buchanan rejects the ideals of the Founding Fathers *and* Ronald Reagan, who – according to Pat Buchanan – faced a threat (the Soviet Empire) during his time in office that *dwarfed* the one we face now from these cave-dwelling primitives.”
The Founding Fathers also saw nothing wrong with the public flogging of criminals and slaves, also branding and hanging They regularly hanged Indians via military tribunals for depredations against Americans. But don’t let this keep us from speaking of their “Ideals.”
The “Cave dwelling primatives” also dwell in Detroit, Paterson, New York and Los Angeles.
Indeed we should not torture because it is against the law and because it offends our morality. Neither should we jump on board every left wing dog and pony show, advancing their premise that the military, police and intelligence services are cossacks. We do rely on these folks to keep us safe, and hammering them when they go too far just makes them less effective. This all could have been resolved by handing out some pink slips a few years ago.
“The courts have upheld this tactic for “We the People,” but it’s too tough for terrorists?”
The *War Crimes* Act makes a “threat of imminent death” or “the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering” a felony under U.S. Law.
“The Constitution does not offer protection to KSM, nor any other non-citizen”
Article 6 of the Constitution makes “all Treaties made… under the Authority of the United States… the supreme Law of the Land”. And our treaties ban torture and *compel* investigations of any torture allegations.
I love you Pat but defending torture (or torturers)!?
A new DMV of torture is the LAST thing our country needs.
S. L. Toddard, There is prosecutorial discretion, but then that gets in the way of a good purge, doesn’t it?
“Not a single terrorist attack on the United States in eight years.”
Which was the time between the two World Trade Center attacks.
“There is prosecutorial discretion”
Not in this case there isn’t. The U.S. is compelled to investigate acts of torture. It literally could not be more clear:
“The State Party in territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found, *shall*in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.”
Your persistent urging that we reward the committing of atrocities by war criminals by shielding them from accountability is an argument against the Rule of Law. It’s an argument that the United States should ignore the letter and spirit of its treaties and Constitution, that torturers be given the benefit of the doubt based on motives you have invented out of thin air. “I had good intentions” is not really a legitimate defense for committing war crimes, nor is “I was just following orders”. We established all of this a long time ago at the Nuremberg trials.
The whole torture debate makes me puke.
My father, father-in-law, uncle, and step-father served in WWII. My uncle died in that war.
If they were alive to hear about this crap they’d puke, too.
Mr. Buchanan, feel free to keep defending this crap. I will resist you as long as have any resources whatsoever to bring to bear.
You’ve famously said that this nation is engaged in a “holy way”. If you want it, you’ll get it, and you’ll see me on the other side.
The “enhanced interrogation” program was illegal and completely out of keeping with American values. It was morally bankrupt. Feel free to defend it, because that way we’ll all no exactly where you stand.
And by the way, that Kevin Costner/Sean Connery thing was a movie.
These charges have been subject to several reviews, generating a mountain of material. If you insist on a show trial, there is plenty of material from which to draw. Some firings and demotions would have been enough to satisfy even the Dudley DoRights among us. But are you are naive enough to believe that Holder is seeking justice under the rule of law?
You accuse me of wanting to “reward” war criminals for torture. Hmmm, first you want an investigation, but you’ve pronounced guilt already. You then accuse me of assuming “motives out of thin air.” I hate to break this to you but motives are germane in criminal prosecutions, at least in the mitigation phase.
I take your point about the Nuremberg Trials. It generated a lot of expost facto law in favor of one set of murderers (Soviets) over another set of murderers (Nazi’s.) In that sense it is like like our current situation. An excellent case of do-gooders serving as the pawns of leftists.
“These charges have been subject to several reviews, generating a mountain of material”
I’m not sure how that’s relevant, but okay.
“If you insist on a show trial”
I don’t insist on anything – our laws do:
“The State Party in territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed (torture)… shall… submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution”
“Some firings and demotions would have been enough to satisfy even the Dudley DoRights among us”
You believe *demotion* a proper punishment for someone found guilty of war crimes – of *torture*? How eccentric. Unfortunately for you most of the Dudley DoRights among us believe that our laws have meaning, and that it’s doubly important that the most powerful among us are held to those laws. We take little things like “torture”, things like “war crimes” seriously. A demotion! Haha.
“But are you are naive enough to believe that Holder is seeking justice under the rule of law?”
Not at all – if he were truly motivated by fealty to the Rule of Law the proper place to begin an investigation (and likely subsequent prosecution) would be with President Bush. As it is Holder is bending over backward to spare the former administration from accountability for their myriad felonies and war crimes.
“You accuse me of wanting to “reward” war criminals for torture”
I don’t accuse you of it, I merely note it.
“Hmmm, first you want an investigation, but you’ve pronounced guilt already”
Whether or not they are “guilty” is actually beside the point as far as whether investigations are warranted. *Allegations* of torture *compel* investigation. An investigation will determine the need for prosecution, and a trial will determine guilt or no.
“You then accuse me of assuming “motives out of thin air.” I hate to break this to you but motives are germane in criminal prosecutions, at least in the mitigation phase.”
Uh… yes, I know. That does not change the fact that you have no idea who the individual torturers are nor what their motivations were, but still concoct noble-hearted motivations for their torture. Which is to say that yes their motivations are germane, but the fantastical motivations you have constructed *for them* are not.
“I take your point about the Nuremberg Trials. It generated a lot of expost facto law in favor of one set of murderers (Soviets) over another set of murderers (Nazi’s.) In that sense it is like like our current situation. An excellent case of do-gooders serving as the pawns of leftists”
You do have a tendency to drift off into non-sequiturs. According to our own laws, “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture”, and “an order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture”.
Conservatives would be in a losing battle, If they try logic when chatting with deceptive persons. The agenda you’re up against is a desire to damage Cheney, then Bush, then the GOP, then the US itself.
The well-meaning anti-war .coms are being used, by the “Hate Bush/Cheney”‘s, as the stealth-anticonservatives further this agenda.
The irony is that the “hate Bush/Cheney”’s are in turn being used by the current administration to smokescreen the White House’s mis-steps, concerning energy control, economy control, and health control.
Look for much “sound and fury” (in the Shakespearian sense), and for one or two peons to get hung out to dry, while the “Independent Prosecutor” cries “it’s just too bad we can’t get Bush/Cheney”, and for both the anti-wars, and the stealth-anticonservatives, to ultimately scream in the pain of the unfulfilled when the dust settles.
Bittersweet to see deceptive people get deceived, and used, by this Presidential Administration.
your all full of shit .. if any of your family members were about to be killed in a plot and you had the choice to use any means necessary .. everyone in that situation would .. and thats the truth
Im no fan of patriot act and im not a neocon and im not an interventionalist ..but you guys sound like a bunch of aclu lawyers ..Why are you all so feminized? passive? why do you care about the rights of people who have zero regard to the geneva convention and behead our own people? .. If you really mean what you say then why dont you all rise up and demand the Military stop torturing our soldiers thru waterboarding ..why do you think our own men are waterboarded in the service? I never hear them complain..
The geneva convention only works if both parties agree ..if your enemy is willing to use ny means necessary it is our Goverments job to protect us Americans.. I dont even feel illegal immigrants should get the benefits of our great country …So why the hell would i want to afford those benefits to muslims who hate us?
Mssrs. Stoddard and Meehan:
It strikes me that you guys are not getting at what really divides you.
For instance if the U.S. exercised its right to withdraw from the Convention and then voted to overturn the statute that was meant to execute its provisions I doubt that you, S.L., would suddenly have no problems with the U.S. using the kinds of methods it apparently has now been shown to have employed.
And as to you Thom I have no doubt you appreciate Stoddard’s point that because of the Convention the U.S. signed and the law that it passed that to not follow same does implicate the problem of picking and choosing which laws are to be followed depending on whose ox they gore.
The issue then seems to me to just get back to the fundamental question of whether the U.S. ought to be able to use the kind of very tough interrogation methods that we now see it has employed. And I don’t think that one can deny that at some point some of same did indeed constitute torture: Can anyone say, for instance, that if they were waterboarded time after time after time for days on end that they weren’t being tortured?
After thinking it through then Thom I wonder if in a way Phil Giraldi’s comment here didn’t kind of point the way towards as valid an answer as possible. That is, like you I hate to see this matter being used as a mere partisan political issue now, but in the end of course we can never keep people with bad motives from disingenuously attaching themselves to doing the right thing. And as per my first comment I see lots of hypocrisy being present in talking about torture given all the terrible other things we now routinely do in wars today. But I thought Giraldi made a point wonderfully in that while acknowledging that such hypocrisy exists he said it still wasn’t an argument in favor of going any further to “institutionalize barbarity” by sanctioning torture.
In essence then, as I at least took it, acknowledging that yes, in war today we do some God-awful things, but it’s clear that there’s something about torture that just grabs many people by the guts and so why the hell not just rule this one damned additional God-awful thing out of bounds? Especially if, at best, it can seem only somewhat efficient?
Almost like an argument that “okay, so yes we’ve descended into damn near every other kind of butchery, so let’s just try to at least remember our ideals by banning this relatively smallish thing even if, in the final analysis (just like bio-chem warfare maybe), it isn’t all that different from all of what else we routinely do.”
Plus, in thinking it over further I think one can also rather easily conclude that it’s simply and clearly in our own long-term national interest to honor a ban. Was there anything else that we did in these recent years that half so much brought us the disgust of the rest of the world as those pictures from Abu Ghraib and these stories of waterboarding and God knows what else? And of course when you torture you are just inviting your enemies to torture your own people too when they get captured.
Persuades me at least. That “institutionalizing barbarity” line carries a lot of validity, and power too I think.
I do believe that Thom Meehan makes some fair points though Mr. Stoddard and think that in denying the idea that any U.S. prosecutorial discretion exists in these case you are putting more weight on that Convention language you cite than it can bear. At least insofar as what constitutes binding U.S. law.
After all what that Convention language says that the U.S. must merely “*submit* the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.” (Emphasis mine.) And in addition to that mere “submission” language I could just never see the U.S. Supreme Court ever saying that in ratifying that treaty the Congress meant to abolish the absolutely unbroken historical understanding that prosecutors do indeed have large amounts of discretion. *Especially* since in its executing statute I have no doubt Congress was absolutely silent about same, thus of course further and enormously bolstering the idea that of course it did not mean to try to abolish—if it even could given that same is an *executive* function and thus implicates the Separation of Powers doctrine!—that unbroken long historic understanding of what constitutes valid prosecutorial parameters.
Cheers everyone,
TomB. I actually agree with Philip Giraldi about torture, and have said as much above. The root of this disagreement is over the wisdom or the necessity of turning on the men we entrust to safeguard us in the midst of a war.
Toddard admits that there have been reviews already. Those carrying out the reviews, (that is, competent authorities) took taken no action beyond the administrative. He also admits that the investigation will not focus on those who brought us to war or wrote the memo’s authorizing what we now admit is torture. He insists that the government has no discretion in the matter despite President Obama’s position to the contrary until a few days ago. Of course one interrogator who killed a detainee was recently found guilty and is on his way to jail. Doesn’t that suggest that there were “competent authorities” out there after all.
It’s hard to see this as anything beyond malicious posturing at the expense of people paid to protect us.
Toddard is one of those Secular Right blog folks who have no source of authority save the letter of the law. So throwing a few low level operatives to the wolves seems to comfort him. But the letter of the law is pretty inflexible, and it’s far more appealing from the sidelines than it is when you have to implementing it.
For instance. When I was sworn in as a peace officer in the Seventy’s. I had to learn the whole criminal code in my home state. I was amused to find a statute outlawing blasphemy, defined as “denying the devinity of our lord Jesus Christ.” Now it so happened that the Chief justice was a fine jurist named Weintraub. Not surprisingly, I and everyone else in the state decided that the that law was better left unenforced. Are you listening Toddard? When the law is an ass, you don’t have to jump up and ride it.
Why not go back over to the American Spectator and make another impassioned plea for more gentle eulogies for Ted Kennedy?
“For instance if the U.S. exercised its right to withdraw from the Convention and then voted to overturn the statute that was meant to execute its provisions I doubt that you, S.L., would suddenly have no problems with the U.S. using the kinds of methods it apparently has now been shown to have employed.”
That is correct. I would no longer argue the case only from the Rule of Law perspective, but that argument – for investigations – is currently air tight and irrefutable. Torture is alleged to have taken place, torture is illegal, torture allegations mandate investigations – case closed.
“In essence then, as I at least took it, acknowledging that yes, in war today we do some God-awful things, but it’s clear that there’s something about torture that just grabs many people by the guts and so why the hell not just rule this one damned additional God-awful thing out of bounds?”
We already have.
Mr. Toddard:
Firstly let me apologize for mangling your name in my last post. Secondly however and in response to same you wrote:
“That is correct. I would no longer argue the case only from the Rule of Law perspective, but that argument – for investigations – is currently air tight and irrefutable. Torture is alleged to have taken place, torture is illegal, torture allegations mandate investigations – case closed.”
I see from this that while you are now saying that “investigations” are mandated I have apparently persuaded you at least that *prosecutions* almost certainly aren’t and so I guess we’ve narrowed the issue somewhat. And of course Thom Meehan has now noted that some investigations have already been made, even if administrative and not criminal in nature.
I dunno; 9/11 was, however foolishly, a big shock to this country, and in retrospect I guess it was asking too much that we and our elected leaders would respond in a more moderate fashion. That’s not to say there isn’t some validity to your idea that regardless same the law is the law and we ought to just go back and apply it to its limits. But unthinkingly applied the law can be an ass, and mechanically applied it would clearly be an absolute tyranny. (For instance it would surprise me if every single one of the people reading this today didn’t in some way violate some law; making a lane change without signaling, swearing in public, failing to bring in their trash cans yet another day, having an unlicensed pet, and/or etc., etc.)
In addition, there’s also the question here about the wisdom of perhaps establishing a precedent of every new Administration of a changed partisan stripe going back and criminally prosecuting whoever it can from the last, different one.
Accordingly I don’t know that the best result here wouldn’t be a wise special prosecutor coming out and while indeed prosecuting anyone who seemed to go wildly beyond the bounds of reason, otherwise just detailing what happened. And appending to their report the notation that while the shock of 9/11 and the new urgency (if not criticality) of getting information about terrorism and the uncertainty about what constituted torture and etc. formed extenuating circumstances, those circumstances have passed so that our interrogators and etc. should know that a prison jumpsuit will be the reward for going postal on any captives in the future.
Cheers,
TomB, Once Bush’s Legal team wrote memos trying to define which techniques were permissible and which not, the game was a foot. After the anger over 9/11 cooled, the left was free to apply its ACLU standards. America it would seem, is at war with herself almost as much as with the Jihadists. If there were sadists operating in our name, they needed to be court martialed or cashiered.
[...] the form of this strategy that most interests me was recently given by Patrick Buchanan. The CIA, we are told, used mock executions to frighten captives and threatened to kill KSM’s [...]
If the united states does not endorse torturing people to death ..why do we torture our own criminals to death by electrocution .. Why does Ron Paul and others support the death penalty?
Thom Meehan wrote:
“After the anger over 9/11 cooled, the left was free to apply its ACLU standards….”
You keep saying things like this Thom and maybe I’m missing your point but the only argument I can perceive from same is a kind of reactionary one. Thus and again all I’d say is that merely because the Left believes in gravity doesn’t make it either right or smart to attack Isaac Newton, true?
Fight ‘em when they’re wrong, I say. Or like Twain said about doing right, it’ll not only confound your enemies but astonish your friends.
Cheers,
TomB, Hey, Reactionary is my middle name! You think keeping up the pro-torture side of the debate is easy?
Seriously though, I believe that there are reasons of state that come to bear on when and to what degree you reaction to bad behavior. I think this is especially so when fighting savages.
The left is at its most dangerous when it advances under the banner of virtue. Of course we are all against torture. But I believe that the course of action Holder is following is neither necessary or done from high principle. And it will damage the morale of people who out there on our behalf.
Why not declare torture legal and site security of the state as reason.
That is what democratic ally Israel has done and gotten away with!
The trick is coverage or lack of rather ,that is key.
There are 500 Palestinian minors in Israeli jails,that no one has heard of.
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TomF, on August 28th, 2009 at 11:33 am Said:
TomB raises an interesting point by mentioning the 2001 anthrax attacks. In 2002, the FBI was turning the life of Dr. Stephen Hatfill, a ‘person of interest,’ into a living hell. He was subsequently cleared, but not until after being personally and professionally destroyed. Imagine if you will if the Bureau had be able to use on him the methods that were used on Jose Padilla, another American citizen. It’s likely Hatfill would have ‘confessed’ to the anthrax attacks and any number of other crimes as well. And I concur, it makes no sense to prosecute the low-level CIA and military personnel, and not the high officials who authorized these methods.
Hatfill put HIMSELF into the cross-hairs of the FBI with all his lies, boasts, forgeries (letters of reference, Diplomas and a Ph.D. degree Certificate), association with racist regimes (Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa and membership of the neo-Nazi paramilitary wing (Aquila/Brandwag) of the South Afican racist AWB. That has all been revealed in the released Court documents from the case of Hatfill versus the DOJ/Attorney General. However, Simon Cooper exposed the man for what he is way back in 2003 – read the SEED Magazine article at:
http://luigiwarren.blogspot.com/2005/12/just-some-asshole-who-has-too-much-to.html
He destroyed himself……………….