Bush Torture on Trial? (The Nation)

[kpete]

Bush Torture on Trial?
Comment
By David Cole

This article appeared in the April 20, 2009 edition of The Nation.
April 2, 2009


President Barack Obama has until now largely ignored calls to investigate or prosecute former Bush administration officials responsible for authorizing the torture of suspects in the "war on terror." He has said he prefers "looking forward" to "looking backward"--even though former Vice President Cheney admits he authorized waterboarding, and Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, has testified that waterboarding is torture. But the pressure to launch an investigation increased dramatically on March 28 with news that a Spanish judge had begun a criminal inquiry into high-level Bush administration officials' complicity in torture.

The investigation targets six lawyers responsible for devising the legal architecture that allowed torture to become official US policy: former Office of Legal Counsel lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who wrote the August 1, 2002, memorandum defining torture so narrowly that waterboarding and threats of death were deemed permissible; former White House lawyers Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, who headed the so-called War Council, argued that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and "obsolete" and requested the August torture memo; and Defense Department lawyers Douglas Feith and William Haynes, who helped sweep away the Geneva Conventions and authorize torture at Guantánamo.

The complaint that initiated the investigation alleges that these lawyers "participated actively and decisively in the creation, approval and execution of a judicial framework that allowed for the deprivation of fundamental rights of a large number of prisoners, the implementation of new interrogation techniques including torture, the legal cover for the treatment of those prisoners, the protection of the people who participated in illegal tortures and, above all, the establishment of impunity for all the government workers, military personnel, doctors and others who participated in the detention centre at Guantánamo."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090420/cole?rel=hp_picks

[azul]

1. Philippe Sands' Torture Team and article Green Light opened the door.

The Green Light

As the first anniversary of 9/11 approached, and a prized Guantánamo detainee wouldn’t talk, the Bush administration’s highest-ranking lawyers argued for extreme interrogation techniques, circumventing international law, the Geneva Conventions, and the army’s own Field Manual. The attorneys would even fly to Guantánamo to ratchet up the pressure—then blame abuses on the military. Philippe Sands follows the torture trail, and holds out the possibility of war crimes charges.

by Philippe Sands May 2008

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/guantanamo200805



Frickin American hero in my esteem. Congress even had him testify, and didn't do squat. Villains?

[hootinholler]

2. I wonder if this has been discussed in London?

:shrug:

I certainly hope so, is Spain in the G20?

-Hoot

[Land Shark]

3. "under COLOR of law" -- the most common way to violate ANY civil right. See 42 USC sec. 1983 k&R

Title 42, section 1983 of the United States Code states:

"Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law, suit in equity, or other proper proceeding for redress,{...} http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/42/1983.html

Under "color of law" = of course lawyers are needed to do dirty work and, of course, a legal opinion from a lawyer is no defense at all where the opinion is unreasonable because it violates civil rights.