His watery explanation: "We always supported allowing the CIA to use extra measures. ... What we need is not to tie the CIA to the Army Field Manual." He continued to say his vote against the single standard is "consistent" with his former convictions. He doesn't say how it is."
Torturing anyone is reprehensible. When someone is defenseless and a person decides to abuse his captive, that shows that the torturer has no conscience. You could see McCain as a young man saying that he had been tortured and would do the same to people he captured. Saying that would have precluded his ever being elected to any political position. That's big bro 43 and McCain.
The article "Memo: Laws Didn't Apply to Interrogators -- Justice Dept. Official in 2003 Said President's Wartime Authority Trumped Many Statutes" at click here shows how the prancing imposter W used a reprehensible and uniquely incorrect interpretation of unitary executive powers as an excuse to flip the bird to the world as "The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.
The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce "an extreme effect" calculated to "cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality." Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents had not been previously disclosed. Nine months after it was issued, Justice Department officials told the Defense Department to stop relying on it. But its reasoning provided the legal foundation for the Defense Department's use of aggressive interrogation practices at a crucial time, as captives poured into military jails from Afghanistan and U.S. forces prepared to invade Iraq.
Sent to the Pentagon's general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John C. Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president's inherent wartime powers."
They probably had to hunt around to find someone corrupt enough to go along with their criminal plans, and since none of the leaders were that psychopathic, they had to settle for a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.
The article continues "In his 2007 book, "The Terror Presidency," Jack Goldsmith, who took over the Office of Legal Counsel after Yoo departed, writes that the two memos "stood out" for "the unusual lack of care and sobriety in their legal analysis."
Yoo is the patsy, this current group of GOP goon's Ollie North. Will they use the phrase "loose cannon"?
The article continues "Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, defended the memo in an e-mail yesterday, saying the Justice Department altered its opinions "for appearances' sake." He said his successors "ignored the Department's long tradition in defending the President's authority in wartime." "Far from inventing some novel interpretation of the Constitution," Yoo wrote, "our legal advice to the President, in fact, was near boilerplate." Yoo's 2003 memo arrived amid strong Pentagon debate about which interrogation techniques should be allowed and which might lead to legal action in domestic and international courts.
After a rebellion by military lawyers, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 suspended a list of aggressive techniques he had approved, the most extreme of which were used on a single detainee at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The prisoner, military investigators later would determine, was subjected to stress positions, nudity, hooding, exposure to dogs and other aggressive techniques."
Rummy had to exclude other more qualified and experienced lawyers from voicing their concerns as the article continues "Largely because of Yoo's memo, however, a Pentagon working group in April 2003 endorsed the continued use of extremely aggressive tactics. The top lawyers for each military service, who were largely excluded from the group, did not receive a final copy of Yoo's March memo and did not know about the group's final report for more than a year, officials said. Thomas J. Romig, who was then the Army's judge advocate general, said yesterday after reading the memo that it appears to argue there are no rules in a time of war, a concept Romig found "downright offensive." Martin S. Lederman, a former lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel who now teaches law at Georgetown University, said the Yoo memo helped create a legal environment that allowed prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib. "What else could have been the source of belief in Iraq that the gloves were off and all laws could be disregarded with impunity?" Lederman asked. "It created a world in which everyone on the ground believed the laws did not apply. It was a law-free zone."
McCain, a victim of torture, is now on the side that says we torture theirs so why wouldn't we expect them to torture ours? McCain is condoning torture of US military personnel after he was forced to endure. What kind of twisted freak could come up with that thinking?
On "Countdown with Keith Olbermann for April 3" at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23955733/ Keith Olbermann deals with torture with Jonathan Turley, the constitutional law professor and scholar at George Washington University. as: OLBERMANN: Let's start with this Yoo memo, the torture memo. It was written for the Pentagon the month the U.S. invaded Iraq. A year after the kind of torture that the memo authorizes comes to light in Iraq. Does that chain of sequence blow the administration's it was a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib argument out of the water?
TURLEY: It does. I know John Yoo. It is very personally disappointing to see his name on these memos. Of course, it is nothing new. It destroys the idea that these were just hicks with sticks. They blamed a West Virginia military unit and basically portrayed them as a bunch of thugs. What they were doing is strangely similar to what is laid out carefully in these memos. So the administration was able to force all of the attention on the low-lying fruit and to protect themselves. That took a lot of effort. It took a lot of lawyers. And I think that in the end of this terrible legacy, I think many lawyers will be ashamed of the role that we played, even those of us who opposed it. The fact that lawyers facilitated these acts is a very, very dark chapter for the American Bar.
OLBERMANN: Yes, it reads parallel to the entire lay out of the plot of the movie "Judgment at Nuremberg," how you twist a legal system to just provide excuses for a government. To that point, this memo has a bunch of rationales in it, as you suggested, not just to protect the president, but the individual interrogators, from future prosecution. It argues that you could hurt a prisoner and you can perhaps deem it as self-defense against al Qaeda. How far of a legal stretch is that? How on Earth do you back that up?
TURLEY: It is not even a legal stretch. There is nothing to it. It is an effort to spin, to give some type of cover. The president and his aides were very, very careful to go to the lawyers first, so that they could make a claim that they were acting under some assumption of actual authority. But there really is none. Part of the problem, I think for all of us who have JDs, is that most of us believe we have a sacred duty, at some point, to stand with the law and against those who would break it. While everyone keeps on pointing to when these memos were written, our job is to be dispassionate. It's not to go with the passions of the moment. When you read this memo, it tries so hard to give the president what he wants, and that is the right to do anything that he wants.
Winston is an ex-Social Worker, burnt out by too much indifference regading our weak and weary who had too little interest in politics until the illegal Iraq War started.
81 % of Americans say we are headed in the wrong direction
The primaries are turning out 2 , 3 times as many Dem's, as Repub's, and yet we have MSM news polls trying to make us believe that at of 45% of people polled will vote for McCain.....another Republican after the damage and destruction that this Republican White House with a rubber stamp Republican Congress has brought us..are the people in this country really that stupid..or are we being "set up" again, for the Republican theft (with the Supreme Courts help, again!) of the Presidency..and what will we do about it (if it happens, again) this time...? Pee our pants in protest?
by
Susan Nelsen (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 252 comments)
on Sunday, April 6, 2008 at 6:50:38 PM
