We can thank Representative Conyers, who has posted various DOJ documents on a website, for not swallowing that tea flavoured kool-aid.
The release of those documents precede his scheduled congressional hearings to oversee the DOJ meme complex.
He wants to get at the bottom of this white-wash of war crimes.
The original investigation by the DOJ meme complex, during the Bush II regime, produced a report that was strongly critical of John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steve Bradbury.
As an example, here is a quote from the original report section that focused on Bybee:
Commentators, law professors and other members of the legal community were highly critical of the Bybee Memo. The Dean of Yale Law School characterized its authors as "blatantly wrong" and added that "[i]t's just erroneous legal analysis." Edward Alden, US Interrogation Debate, Financial Times, June 10, 2004 (2004 WLNR9744181). A past chairman(Original Draft, page 2). Nevertheless, Bybee was rewarded handsomely for his poor scholarship with a lifelong federal judgeship, as millions of Americans who do not agree with Bybee lost their jobs, homes, health, and respect for DOJ.of the international human rights committee of the New York Bar Association stated that "the government lawyers involved in preparing the documents could and should face professional sanctions." Id. A law professor at the University of Chicago said: "It's egregiously bad. It's very low level, it's very weak, embarrassingly weak, just short of reckless." Adam Liptak, Legal Scholars Criticize Memos on Torture, New York Times, June 25, 2004 at A14. In the same article, an expert in international human rights law at Fordham University commented, "The scholarship is very clever and original but also extreme, one-sided and poorly supported by the legal authority relied on." Id.
Bybee was one of the original three stooges for the Cheney torture pig-circus who wrote memos of sophistry to try to morph the obvious into the oblivion of double-speak.
When it was clear where the original DOJ report was going, Dick Cheney came online in the main stream media doing disinfomercials promoting torture.
His delusion is that torture, in the form of waterboarding, is the only way to public safety.
Recently the apex of that delusion was reached when he admitted, on national TV, to promoting and advocating waterboarding until it was being done "regularly" (is 83 times a month on one individual regular?) during the Bush II regime's reign of madness.
That onslaught, mixed with the timidity of the Obama administration, Senate mindlessness, along with the spoon-fed deceit of the media, put pressure on the DOJ.
Finally the DOJ decided to waterboard the original report until it was watered down into a McJustice version scolding the bad boys for "misjudgement".
No biggie that hundreds were tortured with waterboarding, as a result of their memos, it was just poor judgment; and never mind that the DOJ during Ronald Reagan's presidency prosecuted republican Texas Sherrifs for waterboarding.
The premise that toxins of power spread within a meme-complex more readily than in the general populace seems to be vindicated by this DOJ narcissism.
Reminds me that in my military days, whenever you were going to do something that fell into the gray areas regarding regulations, the usual response from your supervisor if he thought it was a good idea as well but couldn't officially condone it, was "fuck it, just do it and ask for forgiveness later." This was a widely employed strategy, in open acknowledgement that it was just too time consuming to discipline people for every petty little offense, and that regulations, as a whole, are often inflexible and misapplied. Of course, such tactics more often than not lead to "slippery slope" type of thinking, where once the precedent is set, the limits will be continually tested and expanded until a true, non-negotiable limit is found. Pretty much sounds like what is going on here, although of an altogether higher and more serious order. I imagine this is all playing out just as old Darth Cheney planned it to, so, although I'm appalled, I'm certainly not surprised.
ReplyDeleteIt's gonna get MUCH, MUCH WORSE before it gets better. I keep thinking about Joe Stack's letter. Outside of an obvious fixation with the IRS, he pretty much nailed all the rest. What we have now is crony fascist capitalism, of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. And its not gonna end until the empire is dissolved and restructered, probably involving a lot of violence in the process. Unlike Joe Stack however, I'm confident that it will be a natural process that won't require ultimately senseless acts like his to take place. Government domestic and foreign policy is already proving to be more than up to the job.
disaffected,
ReplyDelete"I'm confident that it will be a natural process that won't require ultimately senseless acts like his to take place. Government domestic and foreign policy is already proving to be more than up to the job."
Yes, on both the domestic and the global front the nations are preparing for midnight.