Phillippe Sands appears to have hit a nerve in Congress that has caused them to see the need to---I don't know---do something other than prepare for winning the election in November. And so, it must be said that what he has done by making the rounds on popular progressive news shows, by conducting interviews with several Internet websites, and by writing an article that was published in the corporate media and a book is a gift to Americans.
This gift offers us a window of opportunity to educate the people of America on what this Bush Regime has been doing and act on it.
We can act on it by organizing to fire the "torture professors" or those lawyers involved at the top who are now educating future generations of American lawyers and leaders. Do you want future lawyers and leaders of America to think torture is justified by the Constitution like Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would like us all to believe?
Douglas Feith, closely linked to the memos and to appear in hearings on torture to be held next month. From the Vanity Fair article:
I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,” he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”
He currently teaches at Georgetown University.
John Yoo, teaching Constitution classes at Berkeley in California, put together the legal justification for torture, which is that if you cannot prove intent to torture, than you are immune from prosecution or punishment. In other words, you can be cruel and inhumane and not have to take responsibility for it.
This exchange reveals just what kind of mentality these "torture professors" are harboring:
Cassel: If the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty.
Cassel: Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo.
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.
The Bush Regime is guilty of war crimes.
The most vulnerable members of the criminal regime are the lawyers who have now moved on to teach (or indoctrinate).
The National Lawyers Guild, Center for Responsive Politics, American Civil Liberties Union, and World Can't Wait-Drive Out the Bush Regime! are all working collectively to have Yoo fired from Berkeley, disbarred from his profession, and tried for war crimes.
All lawyers/professors connected to the torture memos (and responsible for their existence) deserve to be held accountable for engaging in immoral, inhumane, and illegal acts such as the formulation of legal justifications for torture.
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