Obama, Bush And The Rule Of Law | The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.
Sully accurately makes the point that neither Bush nor Obama have the authority to torture, that Congress alone as the authority to make rules regarding captures. Laws and treaties have been passed that make torture clearly illegal in the US., therefore:
no legal authority in human history would judge the waterboarding of a prisoner 83 or 183 times in one month as anything but torture. If it were done to a US soldier, would Dick Cheney refuse to call it torture? Of course not, although it is telling that no reporter has ever asked him this obvious question directly.
And so it is simply an empirical fact that president Bush broke the law and violated his oath of office by ordering the torture of prisoners.
Note that this wasn’t an emergency moment, or a ticking time-bomb scenario. It was a decision to torture made months after the 9/11 attacks and re-asserted years after the 9/11 attack, and set up as a program, with elaborate rules, staffing and bureaucracy, to torture prisoners for the indefinite future.
Now fast-forward to February 2007 when the International Committee of the Red Cross notifies the president of the United States that it believes that his administration has engaged in what was unequivocally torture of prisoners. At that point, the president is required, by law and by treaty, to open an investigation and prosecution of the guilty parties. The president failed to do that, another breach of the law. Moreover, any president privy to that information is required to initiate an investigation and prosecution – or violate the law and the Geneva Conventions.
And so Obama’s refusal to investigate war crimes is itself against the law. And so torture’s cancerous route through the legal and constitutional system continues, contaminating the future as well as the past, rendering the US incapable of upholding Geneva against other nations, because it has violated Geneva itself, and giving to every tyrant on the planet a justification for the torture of prisoners.
In this scenario, America becomes a city on a hill, where the rule of law is optional and torture acceptable if parsed into legal memos that do not pass the most basic professional sniff-test.
America becomes a banana republic.
(Emphasis mine)
Just so. You can’t parse or nuance your way out of this. Obama, through inaction, makes himself complicit with the clear crimes of the Bush administration. He has a duty to investigate and prosecute should evidence lead in that direction. It’s not an option. There have been some stirrings of independence in the DOJ. Let’s hope that if Obama lacks the stomach to follow the law, Eric Holder will see it as a clear matter of duty.
Wrong is wrong. This a a battle for the soul of our republic, for whether or not we’re a nation of laws, or as Sully says above, “banana republic”.
MSNBC is saying right now that Obama is leaving it to Holder and the DOJ to decide if it’s appropriate to persue the policy makers who approved torture as a valid interrogation technique. We’ll see what Holder is made of. An independant prosecutor would be a good first step.
