It can't come as a surprise to very many of us at this point that Michael Mukasey's Justice Dept is bending over backwards to supply the CIA - and presumably the military - with excuses to justify torture.
The Justice Department has told Congress that American intelligence operatives attempting to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods that might otherwise be prohibited under international law.
(emphasis added)
It's bullshit, of course. Surely the president can't contravene the Geneva Convention on his own hook just because some interrogator tells him he's sure a prisoner will give up something about an attack on a US target if we almost drown the sucker? And since when does any politician get to decide under which circumstances he'll obey the law and which ones he won't?
Well, actually, as Glenn Greenwald explains, since McCain stage-managed the MCA.
There are two reasons, and two reasons only, that the Bush administration is able to claim this power: John McCain and the Military Commissions Act. In September, 2006, McCain made a melodramatic display -- with great media fanfare -- of insisting that the MCA require compliance with the Geneva Conventions for all detainees. But while the MCA purports to require that, it also vested sole and unchallenged discretion in the President to determine what does and does not constitute a violation of the Conventions. After parading around as the righteous opponent of torture, McCain nonetheless endorsed and voted for the MCA, almost single-handedly ensuring its passage. That law pretends to compel compliance with the Conventions, while simultaneously vesting the President with the power to violate them -- precisely the power that the President is invoking here to proclaim that we have the right to use these methods.
(emphasis in the original)
Read the whole post for Glenn's parsing of the legal anguage and what it means, but what concerns me here is a) the justification is baloney -
Some legal experts critical of the Justice Department interpretation said the department seemed to be arguing that the prospect of thwarting a terror attack could be used to justify interrogation methods that would otherwise be illegal.
“What they are saying is that if my intent is to defend the United States rather than to humiliate you, than I have not committed an offense,” said Scott L. Silliman, who teaches national security law at Duke University.
But a senior Justice Department official strongly challenged this interpretation on Friday, saying that the purpose of the interrogation would be just one among many factors weighed in determining whether a specific procedure could be used.
“I certainly don’t want to suggest that if there’s a good purpose you can head off and humiliate and degrade someone,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was describing some legal judgments that remain classified.
- and b) that there seems to be some sense on the part of the press (the NYT's Mark Mazzetti, in this case) that poor Mr Bush has been agonizing for months over just where the boundary lines should be.
Determining the legal boundaries for interrogating terrorism suspects has been a struggle for the Bush administration.
No. It hasn't. What the Bush Administration has been struggling with is the lack of acceptance among the American public that the US ought to become a nation that tortures prisoners. Neither he nor his two AG's has varied as much as an iota from their originally stated goals as laid out in the infamous John Yoo memo:
- Anything goes.
- The Geneva Convention is "quaint" and may safely be ignored.
- The president has the power to decide what is and isn't torture.
- The president has the power to decide when torture may or may not be used. No other legal authority needs to be considered, no treaty needs to be obeyed, no international law is relevant. Just the president.
I suspect that may all hold true only if the president's name happens to be Bush or Cheney, but never mind. The point is that the MCA made that thinking legal, and NO ONE (except good ol' Chris Dodd) has suggested the MCA needs to be scrapped (or amended at the very least), not even our two vaunted Democratic candidates. Not even after:
Legislation that was approved this year by the House and the Senate would have imposed further on C.I.A. interrogations, by requiring that they conform to rules spelled out in the Army handbook for military interrogations that bans coercive procedures. But Mr. Bush vetoed that bill, saying that the use of harsh interrogation methods had been effective in preventing terrorist attacks.
(emphasis added)
So even the excuses - the excuses the American people have yet to buy into - have remained the very same excuses they started with, only now Bush has given them the force of law and a new AG has stepped up to repeat the same failed arguments made by the old, hopelessly flawed AG.
That doesn't add up to Mr Bush ever having a second thought about any of this except maybe how to sell this pile of manure to people who don't want it, now or ever.
Apparently we have a new media narrative: Bush the Thoughtful, Bush Who Agonizes Over Tough Decisions. And Bush the Thoughtless, Bush the Stubborn, Bush the Emperor who never questions a decision once he's made it no matter how wrong it proves to be, that Bush is retired as if he'd never existed.
Of course, for our reality-challenged media he never did.
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