What If Trials Prove Torture Wasn’t Necessary?
Cynthia Kouril and Adam Serwer and both have really good smackdowns of Mukasey’s op-ed against civilian trials. Cynthia writes,
The thing that bothers me most about this article though, comes near the end:
Nevertheless, critics of Guantanamo seem to believe that if we put our vaunted civilian justice system on display in these cases, then we will reap benefits in the coin of world opinion, and perhaps even in that part of the world that wishes us ill. Of course, we did just that after the first World Trade Center bombing, after the plot to blow up airliners over the Pacific, and after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
This twisted notion that we would only observe our own laws, our own Constitution, our own Enlightenment Age ideals—if there was something in it for us, if we could somehow profit by it— appalls me.
NO, No, no, no, no. We observe our own laws, we follow our own constitution, we hew to our own Founding Father’s ideals, because it is the RIGHT THING TO DO.
And Adam, responding as well to Michael Isikoff’s report that 25 detainees will soon be shipped to the US for trial, speculates,
I’m skeptical that the Classified Information Procedures Act, the statute governing the disclosure of classified information in federal court, is inadequate to prevent whatever national security information might be disclosed in any of these trials. But remember, if you look at the more declassified version of the 2006 CIA Inspector General’s report that was recently released, there are 24 straight pages of redacted information describing what was done to KSM. If you’re wondering what Mukasey and the others are worried about a civilian trial disclosing, it’s a good bet that some of it is probably in there.
Perhaps, Adam argues, Mukasey (and Lindsey Graham and John McCain) don’t want civilian trials because they would provide Khalid Sheikh Mohammed opportunity to detail the torture done to him.
There’s one other possibility, though.
If DOJ decides KSM can get a civilian trial, that means there’s enough information to try him and his alleged co-conspirators independent of any evidence tainted by torture. It means the government learned sufficient information about the 9/11 plot via people they did not torture, pocket litter, or in sessions that they believe they can segregate off from the torture they did to KSM.
And that–along with what will surely be extensive litigation about what is admissible–will make it clear how much information was available via means other than torture.
Granted, they’ll be trying KSM just for 9/11 and not, presumably, for the Liberty Tower Plot (though they have information about that, too, via other sources than KSM). But a civilian trial will expose some of what was available without using torture.
And that may be why the apologists are afraid of civilian trials.
I love the way your mind works. Brilliant article, EW. Many thnx.
How tainted can trial evidence get before the whole trial is tossed? Even if a prosecutor can unravel a Gordian Knot of items obtained through torture, what difference if other evidence was supposedly obtained more or less honestly.
Mukasey – former lawyer, law firm partner, federal judge and Attorney General of the United States – is also saying that he no longer believes in the law, himself or his own career.
The law is useless if it won’t come up with the right answer, which isn’t justice or the truth or a fair-minded result; it’s whatever answer the Leader dictates. Judges, advocates and juries are simpletons, who can’t be trusted to do that. They should be discarded. We need only law enforcers; they need only enforce the law, for which they need only weapons and unrestricted spying powers. Legislatures need only write the laws their Leader tells them to.
Mr. Mukasey has become a Cheney clone: if the law won’t come up with the right answer, fuck the law. He should not be writing OpEds. He should be applying for work in the inJustice Departments of African and Latin American dictators, or with Mr. Putin. They share his “utilitarian” views.
If the truth hurts, so be it. We’ll all be better when this is dealt with and put to bed.
This whole sham, Global War On Terror, must be put on trial.
Eric Holder is beholden to extra(Legal)ordinary rendition so don’t look to Holder to charge himself with his personal war crimes.
This is infecting our social fabric and to think these creeps, who tortured, are coming home to marry our daughters and sit next to us in church.
OT: James Boyd describes a typical senator’s day from the first issue of the Washington Monthly, as part of their 40th anniversary greatest hits.
Was Cynthia Kouril LHP at one time?
I think the torturers response would be that the torture was “necessary” to “save us” from future attacks, not to get the info for a present trial. Not a truthful or moral or accurate response, but I’m pretty sure that’s how they would dismss that.
I hadn’t seen CK’s piece, glad you linked it.
This:
brought to mind something in a talk given by Sabine Willet (one of the attys for the Uighur and a commerical bankruptucy lawyer who felt compelled by the injustice to do something – while DOJ litigators felt compelled to lie to courts and continue to block habeas requests for men who their own files showed were innocent and had been abused and tortured bc of governmental policy that *no one leaves GITMO innocent*)
In any event, Willet tells a story about a man who, during the Vietnam war, went every evening to light a candle and stand in protest in front of the WH. Every evening. Finally, one of the policemen who had seen this night after night asked him something like *why do you do this every night, it’s not going to change anything* The answer was “it changes me.”
The Dept of Justice has been extinguishing all the candles for so long now, it has changed the nation.
I will once again say that IMO the main reason Mukasey et al don’t want anyone in the US is that we are going to be creating a judicial record of war crimes and torture crimes committed by the US as US policy, in the US courtroom. That’s likely not to interfere with the convictions – we won’t have a Burge-like situation where the toture victims get to walk for someone like KSM (maybe for someone like Zubaydah, with the right jury and real facts and a sane enough client to participate in his defense – umm, nah, let’s just go back to not gonna happen)
Anyway, the judicial record is going to be made on war crimes that the US committed and that the US is, again as a matter of “policy” not going to prosecute. Despite the Torture Victims Act or the War Crimes Act as it existed at the time – preMCA. We have a very big issue on the War Crimes Act, Article 147 of the Geneva Conventions, and Obama’s continued love affair with renditions to torture. Under the older version of the War Crimes act, an Article 147 breach (sending a protected person out of country) was internally defined in the Conventions as a severe breach and the WCA provided for prosecution of severe breaches. With the MCA changes, they think they’ve skirted that issue, by (under the rhetoric of making things more definite) spelling out and defining the severe breaches that would give rise to a claim under the WCA and omitting Article 147 violations.
But that doesn’t make them non-violations. So while our criminal law has allowed rendition to the US for prosecution, and this has been bastardized into an allowing the US to kidnap people in foreign lands and ship them to other foreign lands for prosecutions there and that bastardized concept has been further virulized to now allow for the US to kidnap people overseas (or buy them in human trafficking transactions) and ship them to foreign lands where there is no prosecution, to be disappeared – – the international laws of war don’t change. As long as we are doing things like drone assassinations in foreign countries with the civilian and child killings associated with those killings and claiming authorization bc we are in a “war” then the “war” rules apply. They don’t allow for a criminal law “rendition” concept with respect to protected persons. So no matter how we’ve tried to “define away” our war crimes, they are still there and Obama has an announced policy of continuing them.
He’s doing what Bush did – “I like this part of criminal law, I like this part of the laws of war, I like this part of just avoiding law altogether with Executive fiat and states secrets – I’ll just throw them all in a bag and use whichever one works” without worrying about the fact that the reason they let you do certain things is that they check you from doing others.
If you want to continue to claim you are at war with terrorists to keep your “protection” for the assassinations you are carrying out, including those that keep going awry and those which don’t go awry but where everyone was just ok with taking out the civilians and children – – then you can’t just pick up people and ship them out of country to be disappeared. And if you do, whether our courts and our ex-AGs like Mukasey fess up or not, it is an internationally recognized war crime. And when a once great nation commits itself to war crimes as policy and defining away evil as it’s policy approach to justice, the path is set.
One road to hell is paved with good intentions, but the more direct route is asphalted with criminal cover ups.
How many experts having to do with gaining information from enemies have come out and said “torture does not work”?
Many
There ya go. Bingo. And this creates a plethora of huge problems both domestically and internationally.
Nicely done.
Mumble stumbles.
It doesn’t seem possible that Team Obama would listen to Cheney and BabyDick time after time and not have something up their sleeves.
If this is the plan, it’s brilliant.
OT – From the DOJ’s Inspector General:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Foreign Language Translation Program (Redacted for Public Release), Audit Report 10-02, October 2009 (160 page PDF).
EW “NO, No, no, no, no. We observe our own laws, we follow our own constitution, we hew to our own Founding Father’s ideals, because it is the RIGHT THING TO DO”
Clearly Mukasey does not believe “no one is above the law” and our Reps need to remember that the peasants have and are watching. Along with the rest of the folks around the world
What is Mukasey’s attachment to protecting the individuals who not only ignored international agreements and then re wrote torture laws, and clearly supported the implementation of the torture. Just who or what was Mukasey protecting. Can not forget that Schumer and Feinstein were part of the group to bring us Mukasey.
Just hope Isikoff goes after the torture and those ordered these laws to be rewritten, those who rewrote and those who tortured as vigourously as he investigated Clintons blowjobs.
Mr. Mukasey’s lawyering and federal judging career was in NYC. Rising to great heights there, or even getting the trash at your diner collected or your licit and illicit insurance and protection rates paid, requires accommodating the shadowy as well as the legal.
What are the odds that a government addicted to illegal domestic spying discovered a personal or relational background that Mr. Mukasey would rather not come to light? Has he simply foregone the light to join Mr. Cheney on the dark side? Whatever his reasons, Mukasey has been Mr. Cover-Up at least since joining Mr. Bush’s regime.
Maybe. The question is where the line is drawn; i.e. is the evidentiary threshold cutoff at evidence from the defendant that is resultant from torture, or evidence from any source resultant from torture? As hearsay preclusion will presumably be in effect it should be hard to allow evidence resulting from torture of others in, but that depends on the honesty of the government witness as to the sourcing of their statements and testimony. There will be some gnarly CIPA hearings in this regard I predict.
Further to your point EW – the Padilla case already made that point. And yet, his US citizen status and US homeland torture, conspired to directly with the DOJ which handed him off to be disappeared by the military and which went to Luttig time after time to say they had to be able to mentally and physically abuse him (in filed affidavits) sequestered from any faint hope for justice, bc otherwise their secret “methods” that were so necessary to “defend us” wouldn’t work – in any event, that US based torture did absolutely nada with respect to his prosecution or with respect to the arguments against using the US military to disappear US citizens into abuse and human experimentation.
No one cared. No one could convict him fast enough, and we have a lot of judicial precedent now on how “irrelevant” executive torture is to the prosecutions and convictions and judicial acquiesence in the destruction of evidence (Padilla’s defense were confronted with missing evidence too and there was NO judicial penalty) and in the cover up of torture.
And while Fitzgerald didn’t get a great prosecutorial outcome in his Saleh case, he also laid a helluva lot of judicial precedent for how to have torture based trials. He got authorizations to bring in masked torturers who would never be subject to court sanction if they did lie to the court and let them testify as if they were credible, etc.
We have spent the last few years, not just generating a lot of pro-torture propaganda and sentiment, but also establishing some very stomach churning judicial precedents. They’re there now. They’ll be used.
It’s almost farcical now to go back and read that first Philbin memo, where he was actually concerned with trying to establish a reasoned rationale for being able to use a “real” military commission with real military law instead of a criminal law setting. Poor boy – he has to look back at the treatment by the military of something like Qhatani, where Crawford refused to go forward, vs. the criminal justice treatment of Padilla, where his torture was a nonstarter with the courts, and wonder why they ever thought they needed the military option and ponder, in amaze, all the MCA crap they had to come up with to insulate themselves from their torture consequences in a military setting, when all along the courts here were so amenable.
File an affidavit and internationally recognized kidnap/torture of an innocent Canadian goes away. But change military law, get a CIC giving orders and stacking the commissions etc and you still get stuck with a court martial turned down bc of torture. The only good thing they were left with was that JAG can’t go after Bush and Obama.
I think what EofH@3 said should be read aloud to our former Atty. General.
psst ew – you might want to change this:
And that may be why the apologists are afraid of civil trials.
to
And that may be why the apologists are afraid of civilian trials.
I’m thinking they are afraid of civil damages suits, but your post is more about the civilian v. military issue than the civil suits for non-prosecuted criminal torts.
I don’t think it is the damage suits so much as creating the record in general as you originally noted. Damage suits have all kinds of roadblocks, even with a decent record created.
I agree – I was just using that to make the distinction between civil and civilian.
Thanks.
Among the reasons for wanting to sweep all these cases under the rug and keep the detainees locked up forever is that a few of them really were security risks, and really were guilty of illegal acts, but malfeasance by the Bush administration has so screwed up their cases (through torture and other Constitutional abuses) that they could never be convicted because ALL of the evidence is tainted.
What a legacy.
Bob in AZ
Yup. Essentially what happened with Toobz and a few other high-profile cases. It’s what happens when you turn Main Justice over to Regent University grads.
Nice editorial in the NYT today on the Bush/Obama coverup:
Read the whole thing.
I had just read that, and was going to post the link here. Thanks.
And, yes, it really is a strong editorial.
A-yep.
I suspect that part of the problem is that Obama, like Bill and Hillary Clinton — a former president and our current SoS — don’t have a military background and thus are somewhat easily rolled by military brass. (“Do what the nice men in uniform say, you dirty little draft-dodgers, Or Else!”)
This is why I wish that Obama had made a place for Wes Clark on his team. Does Obama have, anywhere on his team, a military figure who supported the Obama campaign early? Aren’t all of Obama’s military advisors hold-overs from Bush?
Bob in AZ
It’s also the subject of Glenzilla’s post today. Good reading.
Thanks for this. Maybe Holder will notice this, and decide that maybe it is time to move on from Bushian cover-ups and actually do what he’s supposed to do.
(I can hope, can’t I?)
Bob in AZ
Went to the Holder nomination hearings in D.C. Took notes and I started to lose count of how many times he said “no one is above the law”
Those on the panel also kept saying this…Leahy, Feinstein, Feingold, Whitehouse….”no one is above the law”
I guess they believe that theory that if you say something enough the peasants will believe it. “Iraq “has, might have, could, would if they could, think about, moved, desires, dreams about WMD’s” That works for a while but then reality smacks the peasants upside their heads. Watching people go off to wars based on those lies, prison for years for robbing a corner drugstore, growing marijuana etc etc while those who ignored international agreements, re writing torture laws, torturing, started a war based on that “pack of lies” not only run free. But still fill our air waves (Cheney) with their endless lies.
When will our leaders realize that if they want to stop the rotting from within the U.S. They actually need to apply “no one is above the law”
Glenn Greenwald was all over the NYT article, suggesting that it understates the extent to which many of Mr. Bush’s excesses are now Mr. Obama’s, lock, stock and two smoking barrels. That Mr. O has given them a legislative and regulatory foundation that Mr. Cheney avoided makes him a better bureaucrat, not a better lawyer or leader.
The object of ire should be the Obama Administration, not the NYT Opinion piece. I find no fault in the NYT piece, for what it was – a lead opinion – I thought it was, and is, commendable.
By “all over” I don’t, of course, mean he objected to it, but that he, too, fully covered it. If he objected to anything, it was that others had not made similar observations about events that are obvious from the public record, and that those who did, such as FDL and Glenn, weren’t paid enough attention to or were actively dismissed as DFH’s.
The “object of ire” is that Mr. Obama has adopted the worst excesses of Mr. Bush. Worse, he has institutionalized them for their long term survival, and so that they become a baseline for government behavior rather than a prosecutor’s record of what government ought not do, under penalty of prosecution and imprisonment.
That behavior begs the question of what Rahma & Bahma are doing – how much more of the Cheney excesses are they refining and expanding – beyond what we know about.
More OT from Main Justice:
Oooh, Christie pimped for Herb Stern’s kid. That could leave a mark.
Would that make it a Herb
SternStain?Yeah, it could. Stern is a very bigshot there and Christie had already appointed Herb Stern himself to one of the windfall rich positions as a deferred prosecution agreement monitor.
When will the torturers get a fair trial is what I want to know…I’m still waiting…
I like your take, too. I wrote over at Adam’s that while there may be several reasons, yes, I think avoiding any reports and more discussion of torture and assorted war crimes is exactly why. It’s pretty despicable when lawyers in such high positions argue against due process, habeas corpus, and other essential rights. Mukasey was the goddam AG, charged with upholding the law, and doing so for the good of the country, instead of obstructing justice and protecting the Bush gang from the consequences of their illegal and unconscionable actions. And Graham’s been doing this crap for years, trying to prevent investigations and prosecutions, including lying to the Supreme Court in his amicus brief (with Kyl) for the Hamdan case. Those two probably should have been disbarred or at least reprimanded for that one, but nothing happened, just as Bybee and the rest currently have escaped professional penalty – as well as actual justice. KSM may be thorny enough, but putting anyone who was actually innocent and also tortured on the stand might actually make some of the Beltway dolts notice for a moment. Regardless of the specific reasons, and they probably overlap, they don’t want the truth of their policies of torture and abuse getting any more attention.
By definition, the pro-Obama military advisers were “renegades”. Obama’s too “don’t rock the boat” to hire his own rowers. He prefers the corporate outboard.
Torture was necessary because the reports of it kept Decider Bush titillated between bike rides, especially during meals, and at bedtime.
Let’s not forget that torture of al-Libi got the link between AQ and SH that Cheney was data mining for. IMHO, that was a LARGE part of the torture regime. False confessions are a prime objective in torture.
Thus back to MTW’s hypothesis: torture afficiandos don’t want it to be proved that prosecutions can be made without torture evidence, because they want to torture to obtain false confessions.
Agreed it will also force all the Army, CIA who told Darth torture would not work to go the record to save their own asses. Darth an Imperial CEO if there ever was one is ignoring the experts because he knows better.
Bush’s Legacy project takes a hit then as we find out Bush sided with Darth a man with no torture experience over the experts who have studied and very well may have committed torture before 9/11.
Thats like listening to your crazy cousin rather than a Union Plumber about the best way to unclog a Drain.
Darth in any given situation prefers using Dynamite to unclog drains and Torture to get answers he thinks going to extremes proves he is a Man of Will. I’m sensing he is over compensating for being a Draft Dodger.
Back when Darth was around being a Draft Dodger was a big social stigma my Dad caught crap for wanting to stay in school to get his B.A he got it then got drafted.
Darth however kept on going to school I’m sure everyone called him a coward.
Goddammit.
How do you good folks writing all this stuff (I mean all of you, from EW’s post to the wonderful comments) keep your anger in check over this?
This shit infuriates me more than the health care debacle, and that’s infuriating. Nobody’s held accountable, nothing’s changed, and there is never going to be any incentive for any administration to follow the rule of law. We might as well elect Kings and disregad the Constitution (much of what we have already I know), but GODDAMMIT THIS AIN’T THE AMERICA I GREW UP IN.
How do you guys keep from throwing your computers out the window. I’ve watched the shit for all these years, and now I’m not sure what’s more shocking, the shit that BushCo did or the fact that ObamaCo seems hell bent on doing nothing about it, and in fact is continuing it.
Goddammit, I want my country back.
I’m with you, OFG, on this. My method of dealing with the anger is to sublimate it into some more useful activity, such as writing letters to my representatives, or the local newspaper editors, or to join local activist groups, or write my family members, etc. It’s the only way I know to keep sane.
Someone re-told the story of the man who came to the White House gate every day to light a candle, staying with it to meditate. Finally, a local policeman who had witnessed this ritual for weeks finally asked the man why he did it? Upon learning the cause, the policeman commented that since his ritual seemed not to work, why did he do it? The man supposedly replied, in effect, “it works on me.”
That’s my answer. The anger motivates me to do something. I hope it works, but even if it doesn’t, “it works on me.”
Bob in AZ
I smoke pot.
Mukaseyis hardly a disinterested third party
This is my problem with organized religion fear of Hell, the Reward of Heaven are not moral reasons to be good you must want the good for its own sake. Remove punishment and reward and people with this world view would all turn into animals over night.
It is precisely when the rules break down in a Crisis we see the true morality of a person.
DFH, really. What other folks would ever agree with such a sentiment? /s
Other Lefties the GOP seems to think all Men and women too are naturally evil but they only offer fear of punishment never reward for being good its like they think the Old Testament is not hard enough!
From Sully today. Hair raising.
GWOT justifies everything. Shades of Hitler.
I hate to say it but it doesn’t surprise me at all. The Phoenix Program in Nam was run by CIA and people captured by Phoenix teams were routinely turned over to the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) for interrogation, which almost certainly involved those individuals be tortured and at times murdered. It should be noted that torture in Asia was often used to punish folks for “wrong thinking.”
We all somehow believe that America is this special place where only good and G_D exists. Think truly about our history. We almost completely created TOTAL genocide to all the Native American Indians.
We have a indescribable history to slavery and post Civil War history, then Reconstruction and Jim Crow laws that lasted until 1965 (and probably still exists in this country today).
We interned Japanese American citizens in the Second World War.
We were very anti-Semitic during before, during and after WWII. We have also been anti-Italian, Irish, Polish and probably others.
We employed many SS and German officers after WWII to be part of our FBI. And we hired the German Engineers from WWII to develop our rockets to beat the Soviets in the Cold War.
During President Kennedy’s time we tried to assassinate Castro. We assassinated the leader of South Vietnam if not others leaders from other countries I do not know from my history readings.
So why not put this torture issue up front to continue the story of what this “Great Country” is before its’ people to learn the truth, just like President Reagan giving arms to Iran in the Iran/Contra situation.
Recorded information will only provide a greater history over time that we all are human and that the world of people have the same faults and that America is not the great beacon but only a part of what the human race is throughout the world.
Mukasey’s stance is an example of what I called my Mukasey Principle: No one with a shred of integrity would ever voluntarily associate themselves with or work for George Bush. This is really all you need to know about Mukasey and his views.
Pithy. Uttered while standing on one leg, no doubt. You forgot to say, “No go and study.”
As a Vietnam Veteran, I am outraged and bring on the civil trials.
“And that–along with what will surely be extensive litigation about what is admissible–will make it clear how much information was available via means other than torture.”
Convict Dick Cheney and all others associated.
It is amazing to click through a hundred T.V. stations and not see one picture, one clip of dead, injured, or the 5 million displaced in Iraq. Chris Matthews USED to have a few returning soldiers on, he actually went and broad cast from Walter Reed five or so years ago. But no more.
Rachel and Keith barely whisper about the dead, injured, displaced in Iraq
It’s almost as if the disaster/quagmire in Iraq is over. There are not 40,ooo injured American soldiers…forget hearing anything about the the close to a million dead Iraqi people.
Our leaders sure did learn something from Vietnam. Do not show the American people the pictures. Most Americans seem perfectly satisfied to stay in the bubble worrying about health care coverage. All the while the Iraqi people have had parts of their country turned to rubble, close to a million dead, thousands injured, millions displaced due to our invasion of their country.
Feith, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wurmsers, Bolton etc “so”
SHOW THE PICTURES
None of them talk about uranium poisoning either. It is actually an active criminal cover up of our war crimes.
I have been pressing my Rep. pointedly weather dick cheney should be taken into custody for breaches of the Convention Against torture.His reply follows.
Thank you for contacting me in reference to American interrogation protocols such as waterboarding. I believe that waterboarding is torture, and I am firmly opposed to the practice. Futhermore, I was extremely disturbed to read about the interrogation techniques described in the declassified Justice Department memos released earlier this year. Let me be clear, I oppose the use of torture by our military and intelligence services. Not only is it ineffective, but it is counterproductive to American national security aims.
I believe that the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Blair, was correct when he stated: “these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”
In both World War II and the first Persian Gulf War hundreds of thousands of Germans and Iraqis surrendered peacefully to U.S. troops instead of fighting. The reason? They knew they would not be tortured. This saved thousands of U.S. soldiers’ lives.
I will continue to use my position as a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence to ensure that our Intelligence services are getting the tools and guidance they need to keep our nation safe while also staying true to our values.
So what about dick cheney, War Criminal Extraordinare.
There is no question.
Torture will be proved unnecessary.
I wonder what effect this will have on the Spanish torture investigation.
Seems like Cheney will have to do more than burnish his legacy.
Thanks for the post EW.
And the fact that “that information” was available to many parties internationally and confirmed by many parties which later joined the US in illegal acts.
Mary stated:
I agree but would add that other nations will be named in the process. With the Binyam Mihamed case moving forward with the opening of government suppressed evidence on public record in GB, there will be evidence revealed in foreign courts which will only assist civil cases in the US.
Mukasey is scared of Lord Justice Thomas and Justice Llyod Jones.
Mukasey’s words seem to be written to counter this ruling from Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Llyoyd Jones of great Britain:
To state that our judicial system encourages acts of terror is wrong and ill thought out. Yuval Ginbar would probably point out that Mukasey is simply continuing the Iraeli “ticking time bomb” defense. That “if” we had tortured in those earlier cases, the continuing attacks would not happen. Now that we know there was no ticking time bomb wrt Iraq, he is walking the “ticking time bomb” narrative backwards.
Article 2 of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment states:
Mukasey is simple trying to continue how to establish factually that the state has decided to sanction torture. It’s his attempt at the defense of necessity.
It’s a sickness.
You have a firm grasp of the obvious.Of course there was no need for torture.I guess you don’t have enough to do.If all you people that write these blogs and comments would actually get up and do something constructive about the Health Care Debacle,there would actually be something worthwhile to write and comment about.People are dying everyday and this is the best you can come up with.Who gives a shit about some terrorist that wants us all dead ,not getting his civil rights?Do you think they would care about your civil rights,if you were in their custody?The best course for the Middle East? Nuke ’em all and let God sort them out!
What a pile of ignorant trash that is you have spewed. If you got off your ass and read here and FDL Main more often, you would know that the people at the greater Firedoglake are a large part of the reason there is still a public option and even marginally viable healthcare reform bill left in play.
We are nuking them, look up uranium munitions.