This is rather like the mafia godfather saying that he treats no one in an untoward fashion since he’s checked with his lawyers on everything he does, and they have assured him that it’s all copasetic. For the soon-to-be US Attorney General to be citing these transparently self-serving and worthless “legal” opinions as “authoritatively permitting” government agents’ actions is both ludicrous and ominous in the extreme.
Moreover, what Holder has conspicuously left out of this “answer” is the fact that torture as policy originated from the very top by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Bybee, Yoo, and the rest of this horrid gang. Systematic torture was not merely or mainly the actions of some unnamed “government agents.”
As Obama himself has described them in words and structure strikingly similar to the Holder statement: “I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering up…”
We certainly wouldn’t want to “lawyer” up those fine and extraordinarily talented CIA inquisitor torturers, would we? No, that would be uncivilized. It’s alright to beat and drown detainees since it’s being done by extraordinarily talented CIA agents. Lawyering up such fine individuals would be inhumane!
1 | 2
