If anyone cares to take a stab at this one I would like to ask what do our treaties and laws require as to the nature and scope of any torture investigations? Who can be "immunized" and who can't? What kind of investigation would satisfy our legal requirements to conduct one? I would hate to see Holder and Obama just give us the bare minimum requirements to satisfy their statutory and treat obligations to investigate these war crimes so they can't be made accessories to these crimes.

In other words what legal requirements MUST guide Holder in deciding who and what should be investigated so we can know how to judge anything he may propose on this? Obviously those who carried out torture should be investigated but what about all of those who authorized it, knew about it and failed to act, and all of the lawyers who abetted this program by creating legal fiction to justify it?

In most criminal investigations you start by creating as wide a net as possible to investigate and eliminate people and suspects as you proceed in gathering information. You make deals with the small fish to catch the biggest ones you can.

We don't know enough yet to make these assessments until we hear Holder's actual plan but we could at least begin by trying to determine a base level that would be acceptable and satisfy all legal requirements. We should not allow Holder and Obama to be creating legal fiction either in how they would interpret our laws and treaties on torture.

Sorry

It should be

First they came for the Abu Ghraib corporals and sergeants. We did not say "Enough!"

Then they came for the CIA operatives....We did not say "Enough!"

Then they came for.....

-- macgupta

"Saying" is never going to be enough, no?

Pedinska says she shares my disillusionment but I don't see how that could possibly be true given that my disillusionment does not stem from morons who don't have the first clue but rather from well meaning "hopeful" people whose proposed solutions are nothing of the kind.

*I mean no offense here Pedinska. I am only attempting to clarify.

actually beginning an "investigation" of some type is a step in the "right" direction. One that could "possibly" gather a momentum of its own depending on what is discovered. And that's a good thing and something one should hope occurs. BUT any such investigations will never be allowed to "touch" high level policy makers in the Bush administration, at least to the degree it deals with "war crimes/torture" because to do so would also, at this point, ensnare President Obama as well. He is most certainly, based upon his actions, complicit in war crimes by actively engaging in "covering up" the crimes of his predecessors.

So all in all I'm tending to fall into the adnoto "realist" camp. The system and our political institutions are so fundamentally broken that the "rule of law" is dead in this country--at least in the sense that it applies to all "equally". It clearly doesn't otherwise impeachment would have occurred during President Bush's presidency or criminal prosecutions for FISA violations and/or war crimes would have begun immediately upon Dems obtaining majorities in the House and Senate and Obama being elected. There has been ample evidence in the public arena for years that is sufficient to support a criminal inquiry of any other human being (of any other nation) alleged to have committed the acts Bush et al are accused of committing.

How anyone could arrive at any other conclusion but that the President of the United States and his subordinates are above and beyond the law is completely mindboggling to me.

Only one path to restoring the rule of law in America remains: all Vichy Dems and the entire Democratic Party leadership must be primaried and all current Republicans must be politically/socially shunned as the moral lepers that they are. Only a complete political housecleaning has a chance in hell of changing anything in America.

Well the one other solution is a mass lawyer/judges movement in this country effectively shutting down the legal system but that will never happen because lawyers have student loans and mortgages to pay. And the average Joe would love to watch lawyers as protestors getting clubbed in the head on the nightly news so I'm not so sure we'd have much "public" sympathy behind our movement.

Won't that be in the best interest of National Security as well, just to classifty the whole charade?

Rouge torturers?

The four corners of Yoo?

Short leashed legal magicians and Spineless politicians, bad combo.

Anyway, from Steve Aftergood if you have already seen it my apologies. Link at Sig.

There is a lot of talk about "good faith" and "bad faith". Clearly, the people who crossed even Yoo's lines were acting in bad faith on advice that was obtained in bad faith; call this bad-faith-squared. The argument to prosecute them should be a non-starter.

However, GG accurately points out that the failure to punish the architects of the illegal framework will strengthen, rather than weaken, the incentives in place to do these things again.

The task then becomes to show that high-level Bush administration officials were obtaining advice in bad faith. Now, a rational person might consider actions in contravention to legislative branch statute while ignoring judicial branch precedent to be somewhat...bad. But maybe you buy this whole Unitary Executive Theory thing.

Remember when Cheney said he was the fourth branch of government? Consider that this program was being hidden from not only the judicial and legislative but also the executive branch itself. Because you can always find one person to agree to anything, they selected only a single individual, intentionally avoiding the peer-review process and hiding it from their own people! When it finally did come under peer-review, even hardcore loyalists were forced to recognize that some of it went too far.

I think it's somewhat easier to consider ignoring all three branches of government as somewhat...worse.

So what should we do about the people who acted in good faith on advice that was obtained in bad faith? This becomes quite the gray area. I think it's best to leave these people alone; some of them are probably innocent, and it's better to let a few guilty people go free than to lock up an innocent.