Those who reasoned away what the Bush administration was doing

Enabled them to get away with war crimes:

Glenn Greenwald:

As the Bush administration comes to a close, one overarching question is this: how were the transgressions and abuses of the last eight years allowed to be unleashed with so little backlash and resistance? Just consider -- with no hyperbole -- what our Government, our country, has done. We systematically tortured people in our custody using techniques approved at the highest levels, many of whom died as a result. We created secret prisons -- "black site" gulags -- beyond the reach of international monitoring groups. We abducted and imprisoned even U.S. citizens and legal residents without any trial, holding them incommunicado and without even the right to access lawyers for years, while we tortured them to the point of insanity. We disappeared innocent people off the streets, sent them to countries where we knew they'd be tortured, and then closed off our courts to them once it was clear they had done nothing wrong. We adopted the very policies and techniques long considered to be the very definition of "war crimes".

Our Government turned the NSA apparatus inward -- something that was never supposed to happen -- spying on our conversations in secret and without warrants or oversight, all in violation of the law, and then, once revealed, acted to immunize the private-sector lawbreakers. And that's to say nothing about the hundreds of thousands of people we killed and the millions more we displaced with a war launched on false pretense. And on and on and on.

Prime responsibility for those actions may lie with the administration which implemented them and with the Congress that thereafter acquiesced to and even endorsed much of it, but it also lies with much of our opinion-making elite and expert class.

Exactly. Those who protested in horror and astonishment were belittled, mocked, silenced. Those who loved the United States and knew what was being undermined were shouted down and slandered with words of traitor, communist, terrorist, Nazi-sympathizer. The more the Bush administration did in shredding the Constitution, the more rabid their followers became. All the Republicans who marched in lock goose step are responsible for shielding the criminal activity that went on.

They own the Bush era and all the effects of it.

To try and excuse themselves now is pitiful and cowardly. And hilarious.

We got you on tape and in print, you bastards.

And the Nuremberg defense will not work.

Yoo who?

Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat has the timeline and lists of torture memos and statements that puts Yoo right up there with the Nazi apologists and enablers.

Anyone for the Nuremberg Defense?

The Nuremberg Defense is a legal defense that essentially states that the defendant was "only following orders" ("Befehl ist Befehl", literally "order is order") and is therefore not responsible for his crimes. The defense was most famously employed during the Nuremberg Trials, after which it is named.

Yoo really did want to please his overlords, didn't he?


crossposted at SteveAudio

Tortured argument

We don't torture because what others call torture the preznit doesn't call torture, so nobody can call it torture even if it is torture because we said it's not torture....

In 2005, CIA officials ordered the destruction of videotapes depicting the harsh interrogation of prisoners in the agency's secret overseas prisons. CIA Director Michael Hayden admitted that in December 2007 amid a public debate over the use of "waterboarding" on detainees and whether or not the technique — which simulates drowning — constituted torture. At that time, Hayden said that only a few prisoners were ever subjected to "special interrogation techniques," which can include waterboarding, and that nothing was recorded on video after 2002. That claim is now coming under additional scrutiny, in part due to a classified briefing that will be delivered to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this Friday. Lawyers for one current Guantanamo detainee tell TIME that they plan to present evidence that he was subjected to unspecified "systematic torture" that was videotaped when he was held in secret CIA prisons. The lawyers say the alleged videotaped torture took place after his arrest in 2003.

Majid Khan, 27, a former suburban Baltimore high school student, was first seized by authorities in Pakistan, where he said he was visiting his brother. Khan then spent more than three years in a secret overseas CIA "black site" before President Bush ordered his transfer to Guantanamo along with 13 other high-value detainees. Also transferred was alleged 9/11 mastermind Khaled Sheik Mohammed, who had allegedly ordered Khan to research attacks on American water reservoirs and gas stations.

Khan's lawyers are armed with more than 500 pages of top-secret notes taken during recent sessions with their client at Guantanamo; they will use the material to describe his interrogation and detention to the Intelligence Committee. Though details are highly classified, his lawyers claim that he and others were tortured and videotaped, charges that Hayden and other CIA officials deny. On Feb. 5, Hayden admitted to Congress that the CIA had used waterboarding on Khaled Sheik Mohammed and two others. The CIA continues to assert that it does not engage in torture.

Picture taken from article.

Attorney General Mukasey joins the ranks of those using the Nuremberg excuse,"I was just following orders."




Crossposted at SteveAudio.

Update: The White House would consider using waterboarding again:

In congressional testimony yesterday, CIA director Michael Hayden confirmed that his agency used waterboarding on three al Qaeda suspects. In 2006, Hayden banned the use of waterboarding in CIA interrogations. The Pentagon also banned its employees from using it, and the FBI said its investigators do not use coercive tactics in interviewing terror suspects.

But in today’s gaggle, White House said that it may approve the use of waterboarding again “depend[ing] upon circumstances”:

“It will depend upon circumstances,” spokesman Tony Fratto said, adding “the belief that an attack might be imminent, that could be a circumstance that you would definitely want to consider.”

Later, in a press briefing, Fratto tried to distance himself from these remarks, claiming that he only was talking about “the process” of approving waterboarding. “I’m not speculating,” he declared.

Click on the link to watch him backpedal.

Update 5:00: Blue Girl at BlueGirl, Red State says it best:

When the current occupant authorized waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" (call them what they are: torture) he sold America's soul, and illustrated Ben Franklin's observation that those who would trade away their freedoms for a false sense of security deserve neither.

Waterboarding is torture. Period. Full stop.

It has long since been classified as such, and Congress is considering taking up legislation banning the CIA from using it. It is already prohibited under the Army Field Manual.

I am the ultimate Cold War brat. I have some pretty set-in-stone ideas and ideals. One of them is that we simply don't do things like that. There truly are prices that are simply too high to pay. Abdicating the moral high ground out of fear is one of them.

I realize full measure that "American Exceptionalism" was always a myth - but at least we used to pretend to behave in an exceptional manner.