DoD abandons zone for man coverage; late in game opts for nuremberg defense
Tacitus has this story down so I won't add anything. The short version is this; some DoD lawyers wrote up a brief arguing that the President can do anything he wants, including order torture and indemnify subordinates from swinging if caught allowing torture. One part reads, "In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign ... (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in chief authority." In other words, if we aren't getting good information playing by the rules, well... the President can say there are no rules!
The NY Times has more.
The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons."One reason, the lawyers said, would be if military personnel believed that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful. "[my emphasis]
Didn't work sixty years ago. Won't work now. But rest easy! "'The April document was about interrogation techniques and procedures,' said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman. 'It was not a legal analysis.'"
"Not a legal analysis," my shiny metal ass.
I'm not saying the President has sanctioned torture. But some pointyheaded wonks somewhere in the Pentagon were told to start with the assumption that "authority to set aside the laws is 'inherent in the president'" and work backward from there.
Take it tacitus:
Two possibilities present themselves: either the finest legal minds in the Department of Defense are terrible scholars (hardly an impossibility), or they were presented with a conclusion and told to construct reasoning from which it derives. My guess is the latter. You don't typically see this sort of thing emanating from the American legal profession absent strong compulsion to produce it..
Yeesh.
on
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> I'm not saying the
> I'm not saying the President has
> sanctioned torture.
This looks like a delegated decision that was likely made somewhere between the president and the MPs working at Abu Ghraib. I'm curious where the buck finally stops as orders are orders and vague they're not. I suspect the orders came from far above some reserves general or other scapegoat-du-jour.
> or [the finest legal minds in the
> DoD] were presented with a conclusion
> and told to construct reasoning from
> which it derives. My guess is the
> latter.
Actually, many DoD thinkers are paid to think the unthinkable in its myriad fantastical forms. This would not necessarily mean these unthinkables are on any conceivable agenda, just that were these unthinkables to become orders, the battle plan already exists. For example, plans for an invasion of Canada were on the Army's books for years. There's also lovelies such as chemical warfare and mutually assured destruction. Dr. Strangelove was only part parody.