Red Cross Torture Report

[Lemur]

Oh heck. If the description of the ruling is accurate, I don't understand why they're fighting it:

The ruling essentially grants all non-Afghan Bagram detainees captured outside Afghanistan and held over six years without due process the same right to federal court review that the Supreme Court gave last year to similarly situated prisoners at Guantánamo.

-edit-

Going back to Seamus' (as usual) thoughtful comment:

You don't seriously expect public trials for the 12-20 top level officials responsible for those policies in the Bush White House, DoD, and DoJ to stand trial do you?

There are three classes of people who should face (at the very least) professional censure: the lawyers who authored some of these memos, the psychologists who helped craft the techniques, and the doctors who kept detainees alive (mostly) as they were abused. A lawyer discusses the Bybee memo:

I am a lawyer who has practiced in Washington for more than 20 years. I'm not sure I have the words to describe my reaction upon reading the Bybee memo, but it's fair to say it sent chills down my spine.

Lawyers are a cynical lot - it comes with the territory - but we all know that we have some basic obligations to our clients. One of them is to tell them the truth, and not to conceal facts or law that the client should know about. Even as you must represent your client zealously in disputes, you are required as an officer of the court not to hide adverse precedent. And failing to tell your client about cases that run against the client's preferred result is a profound dereliction of duty.

In that context, the Bybee memo is a lawyer's worst nightmare. It's an F-minus in law school, a zero on the bar exam, grounds for firing a first-year lawyer for an utter lack of understanding of what the practice of law requires.

It is beyond conception to imagine a competent lawyer not even mentioning the cases when the U.S. prosecuted Japanese soldiers for waterboarding, let alone asserting that "there have been no prosecutions" under the specific statute. It is nearly as inconceivable that the memo concludes that the insect technique, used against someone with a known insect phobia, would not cause "severe mental pain."

The only rational conclusion is that this memo is not, in fact, legal advice at all, at least not in the sense that a lawyer would use the term. None of the people involved in writing are incompetent, after all, and none of them would have made these kinds of elementary mistakes in writing for a private client. It was written purely to provide cover. To do that, Bybee and the others involved in these memos knowingly subordinated their oaths as officers of the court and their ethical obligations to give carte blanche to the interrogators and those who directed them. Perhaps they thought it was their patriotic duty; perhaps they thought that the "chatter" mentioned in the memo created an exigent circumstance that demanded that shortcuts be taken; or perhaps they expected that the memos never would see the light of day. I doubt we'll ever really know. Regardless of the reason, though, the dull legalese conceals an utter lack of respect for the law and for any constraints that the law might require. And that's what's really chilling about it.

[KukriKhan]

Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh:
You don't seriously expect public trials for the 12-20 top level officials responsible for those policies in the Bush White House, DoD, and DoJ to stand trial do you?

I do, indeed. I expect the process to begin, charges be laid, evidence publicly revealed - and probably Presidential Pardon(s) issued, ala Ford for Nixon.

If the process is good enough for the enlisted swine, it's good enough for the rest of the chain-of-command too. No one is above the law.

[Tribesman]

Pardon me if I don't take a fat, posh and scuzzy drunk seriously in what he "can't bare".

Thats funny , since that fat git took a similar line on torture to yours .
He underwent that little test because people were suggesting the line he was spinning about torture was bollox
He soon changed his mind about torture didn't he

[HoreTore]

No one is above the law.

Sadly, we live in a democracy, and, as it turns out, democracy means that you are above the law if you are in the right position or have the right connections....

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Sadly, we live in a democracy, and, as it turns out, democracy means that you are above the law if you are in the right position or have the right connections....

We live in a republic, about which I am not saddened at all.

To date, there have been ZERO human polities where all laws and regulations have been enforced with complete and total impartiality. EVERY historical polity has had members who were "more equal" than others for one reason on another (power, connections, money, lineage, whatever).

In principle, no one should be above the law. It is something for which we should all strive. However, expecting to attain that level of impartiality and to then keep it at that level is quixotic at best.

If, as seems likely based on what we now know, those lower echelons who got hammered for their abusive (and in some instances torturous) efforts were indeed following instructions from those in the chain of command above them, then the charges and punishments should also head up the chain. Such would be mete and fair -- but I'm not gonna hold my breath and wait for it to happen.

[Xiahou]

If, as seems likely based on what we now know, those lower echelons who got hammered for their abusive (and in some instances torturous) efforts were indeed following instructions from those in the chain of command above them, then the charges and punishments should also head up the chain. Such would be mete and fair -- but I'm not gonna hold my breath and wait for it to happen.

I still don't agree with conflating the insanity at Abu Ghraib with the deliberate and methodical interrogations carried out by the CIA.

The much publicized guards at Abu Ghraib were sick perverts, plain and simple. They took torture pictures "for fun", posed with dead bodies, posed with naked detainees, filmed detainees masturbating, and even photographed themselves having sex with each other. They're disgusting and deserve every bit of punishment they got and then some- they broke every rule by which people in the military were supposed to live by. It's also worth noting that not just the perpetrators, but their superiors were also punished for their lack of oversight- probably not as much as they should have been though.

You're free to think that waterboarding, etc (as outlined in the OP) is morally reprehensible and should be punished, but please don't put abusive interrogations on the same level as these sickos. They weren't making porno under orders- they were completely out of control.

[Lemur]

Factual problems with the above post:

"Enhanced interrogations" (that's verschärfte Vernehmung to those of you with a sense of history) have not been exclusively carried out by the C.I.A., and nobody has made any serious argument that this is the case. Organizations known to have been carrying out "enhanced interrogation": various elements of the Army, the C.I.A., private military contractors and the Navy SEALS. (The Marine Corps, with its usual savvy, has avoided stepping into this tar pit.)

The C.O. of Abu Ghraib was merely demoted; a serious punishment for a career officer, but hardly the same as imprisonment and conviction. The theater commander received no punishment of any sort ever.

With the exception of taking pictures and having sex with each other, absolutely nothing done by the guards at Abu Ghraib was outside the scope of the newly released torture memos. Once again, I think what makes everybody get prickly is the fact that they took pictures. Enforced nudity? Legal, says the Bybee memo. Sexual humiliation? Perfectly legitimate. Beatings? Legal. Tying someone up and leaving them there for days? Authorized.

I have this funny feeling that if pictures had been taken at Baghram or Guantanamo, we would be hearing from torture apologists how the "bad frat party" had happened there too. Heaven forbid we consider the possibility that legalizing and instituting torture might have had something to do with the excesses. That's just unthinkable.

-edit-

Not that much of anyone in my country seems to care, but by releasing the torture memos and then declaring that we will not investigate or prosecute anyone involved, we appear to be in breach of the Convention Against Torture. But that's just a treaty we signed, like the Geneva Convention. Who reads those meaningless scraps of paper anyway?

[Lemur]

Reference:

Just so we're all clear on what we're talking about, here are some of the newly released memos. PDF warning.

18-page memo, dated August 1, 2002, from Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, OLC (Office of Legal Counsel), to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.

46-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.

20-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.

40-page memo, dated May 30, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA.

[Xiahou]

With the exception of taking pictures and having sex with each other, absolutely nothing done by the guards at Abu Ghraib was outside the scope of the newly released torture memos.

How about keeping a mentally handicapped man on a leash and dragging him around the prison as their pet? That on there? Desecrating a corpse?