Dupe - please delete

[Dudley_DUright]

Such comfort. At the close of the G-8 summit, described by President Bush as "very successful" (except we didn't get anything we wanted), the president offered us comfort on the uncomfortable topic of torture: "Look, I'm going to say it one more time. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to the law. That ought to comfort you."

"We're a nations of laws," he went on. "We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at those laws, and that might comfort you."

There, don't you feel all better now? How comforting to know the Department of Justice memo on the subject of torture advises it "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impaired bodily function or even death." (Memo available on washingtonpost.com.) Just beating the living crap out of someone doesn't count at all. The Geneva Conventions are not binding on us, nor are any other international agreements if it impedes the war effort, says the DOJ. As Professor Michael Froomkin of Miami University told Salon: "The lawyers who wrote it are guilty. The people who asked them to write it, who read it and who may have acted on it -- they're the people who really have to answer for it." Under the DOJ theory of the Constitution, the president can not only approve torture, he can also approve genocide.

The Department of Defense memo, reported by The Wall Street Journal, says the president can unilaterally nullify the federal war crimes statutes, describes how to evade federal court jurisdiction over Guantanamo and lays out ways for government employees to avoid being charged with torture under federal law. The CIA's contribution was to ask for explicit permission to use torture on suspected Al Qaeda operatives at Gitmo.

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http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17120