Tortured logic

UPDATE #2: Well, maybe not. With Obama, one never knows for sure.

UPDATE: Obama seems to be backing away from the issue but that’s nothing new.

We now have a debate going on in this country over whether some of the detainees at Guantanamo and prisoners of our war with radical Islam were tortured. There has been a lot of speculation before this based on International Red Cross statements and books by radical leftist writers like Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. This week, Hugh Hewitt had a valuable debate on his radio show between two law professors, one a leftist and the other conservative. The debate was stimulated by several developments in the controversy, one release of previously classified memos from the Justice Department on whether the techniques used by the CIA constituted torture. These memos concluded that such techniques as waterboarding were not torture.

Many on the right think release of these memos will harm the country. Obama visited the CIA to try to reassure the Agency that he does not want to harm its ability to defend us. He has also promised that no CIA employee will be prosecuted for following the advice given in the memos. He initially made the same promise about the lawyers who provided the opinions of legality of the techniques, now called torture by the left. Since then, he has reversed course, leaving the question of prosecution open.

Let’s read a bit of the debate from Hugh Hewitt’s guests to get the tone. First, professor Chemerinsky, the new Dean of UCI Law School:

EC: I am pronouncing no judgment on anyone. I am saying, though, based on the Jane Mayer book The Dark Side, the Red Cross report and these torture memos, that there is evidence that international law and domestic law was violated. The law…

HH: Erwin, stop right there. What evidence have you got, not Jane Mayer, she’s not credible, she has been discredited many, many times. But what evidence do you point to that’s not contested that says these, Jay Bybee, Judge Bybee broke any law?

EC: First, I strongly disagree about your attack on Jane Mayer. I think her book describes in detail torture that occurred. The Red Cross report describes it. And these torture memos describe things that are clearly cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. Now the question is what caused such torture to occur, assuming that it did? If it could be shown that the actions of Dick Cheney, David Addington, Jay Bybee, and John Yoo among others, led to individuals being tortured, then I think that’s war crimes and they ought to be prosecuted.

So, Professor Chemerinsky relies on a book by a controversial writer to decide what is torture. There is more detail further on.

I think there’s two questions here. First, were individuals tortured by those under American command? I think if you read the Jane Mayer book, you read the Red Cross report, there’s no doubt that individuals were tortured. Waterboarding has been regarded as torture since the early 20th Century. Forcing men to be nude except for diapers is degrading treatment. Physical pain by prolonged staying in the same position is torture. Jane Mayer describes individuals who literally died as a result of torture by American officials. So the first question is did torture occur? We have to investigate. The second question is if so, why did it occur? If the memos that were written led to the torture occurring, then I think they’re responsible. I don’t think they can hide behind being part of Office of Legal Counsel. I don’t think they can hide by saying it was just memos. If their memos led to torture, then they’re responsible just as memos that might have led to Nazi gas chambers are responsible for that resulting. And I do intentionally liken it, torture, to what the Nazis did.

So, we don’t see much doubt there. It looks to me like we are about to disarm the country in a war that is chiefly being fought with intelligence techniques. Why would Obama go after Bush Administration people like this when it has never been done before ?

Well, there is a precedent. In the Reagan Administration, there was a political witch hunt called “Iran Contra.” Some detail is here. Almost all the literature on this affair is deeply colored by politics. At the bottom, it was a political difference- whether to fund the Contras, a rebel group trying to overthrow the Sandanistas, a communist dictatorship installed by the Soviets when Jimmy Carter refused to support the Somoza Regime in Nicaragua. Reagan was banned by Congress from funding them so he turned to private individuals to fill the gap until Congress changed its mind. A Special Prosecutor named Lawrence Walsh indicted a number of Reagan officials, including Cap Weinberger, Secretary of Defense who had had nothing to do with the scandal. Weinberger was pardoned eventually by George Bush.

In essence, the Democrats have been successful in criminalizing policy differences. Ray Donovan, Secretary of labor in Reagan’s Adminstration, was such a case and after he was exonerated by a jury, he asked Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?” Often, the process alone can bankrupt the targeted official, even forcing him to settle rather than go bankrupt with legal fees. Something like that was done with Michael Milken, who pleaded guilty to avoid having his brother indicted. The technique, in the hands of an unscrupulous prosecutor, can be devastating. Why would Obama do this ? Maybe the New York Times has the answer.

Mr. Obama and his allies need to discredit the techniques he has banned. Otherwise, in the event of a future terrorist attack, critics may blame his decision to rein in C.I.A. interrogators.

There, I believe, is the motive for this shameful decision. He is already anticipating that his actions may result in another attack. He wants to avoid responsibility. Harry Truman said “The buck stops here” but that was a long time ago and the Democratic party was a very different organization.

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3 Responses to “Tortured logic”

  1. doombuggy says:

    If everyone in the world were as smart as you, it would be a much “hipper” place 🙂

  2. Doom, do I detect sarcasm ?

    I know that my trial lawyer son disagrees violently with me.

  3. doombuggy says:

    I was trying to draft a compliment off the misspelling in the first reply.

    This torture debate and political headhunting appears to be the Left’s way of playing out one of their revenge fantasies. Those under psychological strain indulge in lots of revenge fantasies. The strident Left commentators on the web all strike me as angry depressives who wouldn’t mind if many died as a result of weak national intelligence rather than live from a strong CIA.

    I fault the Bush administration for trying to make the implicit explicit. In times of crisis everybody is going to use torture if it might serve the larger good. In quiet times we can’t map the contours of such policy. Some things are better left unsaid. Something like masturbation: everybody does it, but no one wants to write a how-to manual (except maybe Joycelyn Elders).