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+--- Thread: NYTimes: Bush officials, attorneys culpable and indictable for torture (/showthread.php?tid=68589)
NYTimes: Bush officials, attorneys culpable and indictable for torture - Gutenberg - 12-18-2008
From the New York Times editorial:
"Most Americans have long known that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not the work of a few low-ranking sociopaths. All but President Bush's most unquestioning supporters recognized the chain of unprincipled decisions that led to the abuse, torture and death in prisons run by the American military and intelligence services.
"Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff."
Read the rest: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/opinion/18thu1.html
After reading the editorial and the evidence it presents, I agree with the assessment in the second graf.
Re: NYTimes: Bush officials, attorneys culpable and indictable for torture - $tevie - 12-18-2008
Oh, god, here come the morons who hate the Times almost as much as they hate college educated people.
Re: NYTimes: Bush officials, attorneys culpable and indictable for torture - MacGurl - 12-18-2008
Very interesting - wonder if it will go anywhere?
Re: NYTimes: Bush officials, attorneys culpable and indictable for torture - $tevie - 12-18-2008
I wish it would. I'd love a chance to prove that the United States is not a champion of torture.
Re: NYTimes: Bush officials, attorneys culpable and indictable for torture - Gutenberg - 12-18-2008
Here is a link to the executive summary of the Senate Armed Services Committee's report.
http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2008/Detainees.121108.pdf
Re: NYTimes: Bush officials, attorneys culpable and indictable for torture - Wags - 12-18-2008
Glenn Greenwald on Bill Moyer last week, worth checking out:
Bill Moyers Journal
From the transcript:
Let's just quickly describe in the most dispassionate terms, as few of euphemisms, as possible, where we are and what has happened over the last eight years. We have a law in place that says it is a felony offense punishable by five years in prison or a $10,000 fine to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants. We have laws in place that say that it is a felony punishable by decades in prison to subject detainees in our custody to treatment that violates the Geneva Conventions or that is inhumane or coercive.
We know that the president and his top aides have violated these laws. The facts are indisputable that they've done so. And yet as a country, as a political class, we're deciding basically in unison that the president and our highest political officials are free to break the most serious laws that we have, that our citizens have enacted, with complete impunity, without consequences, without being held accountable under the law.
And when you juxtapose that with the fact that we are a country that has probably the most merciless criminal justice system on the planet when it comes to ordinary Americans. We imprison more of our population than any country in the world. We have less than five percent of the world's population. And yet 25 percent almost of prisoners worldwide are inside the United States.
What you have is a two-tiered system of justice where ordinary Americans are subjected to the most merciless criminal justice system in the world. They break the law. The full weight of the criminal justice system comes crashing down upon them. But our political class, the same elites who have imposed that incredibly harsh framework on ordinary Americans, have essentially exempted themselves and the leaders of that political class from the law.
They have license to break the law. That's what we're deciding now as we say George Bush and his top advisors shouldn't be investigated let alone prosecuted for the laws that we know that they've broken. And I can't think of anything more damaging to our country because the rule of law is the lynchpin of everything we have.
Re: NYTimes: Bush officials, attorneys culpable and indictable for torture - Acer - 12-18-2008
If Richard Nixon taught subsequent administrations anything, it's that you need a smoking gun to get anywhere with this kind of thing. Too many layers of people involved, and no existing record of anybody giving a specific order (c.f. Iran-Contra). The tape recording system is long gone, the documents shredded or "misplaced" (c.f. Whitewater), and the emails deleted.
In 30 years since Nixon, the only smoking gun anybody could muster was a certain stain on a dress. Barring that, this is all a waste of time, and the only outcome will be the conviction of some poor no-name schleps way down the line (c.f. Ollie North, Scooter Libby, the female soldier in the Abu Ghraib pics.)
Re: NYTimes: Bush officials, attorneys culpable and indictable for torture - DP - 12-19-2008
We could subject prisoners to reading the NY Times OpEd pages-that could be construed as torture. We would have found Bin Laden in no time.
Re: NYTimes: Bush officials, attorneys culpable and indictable for torture - Gutenberg - 12-19-2008
It's good to know you take our country's integrity and international reputation so seriously.8-)
Re: NYTimes: Bush officials, attorneys culpable and indictable for torture - Dennis S - 12-19-2008
DP wrote:
We could subject prisoners to reading the NY Times OpEd pages-that could be construed as torture. We would have found Bin Laden in no time.
You're a regular Jan Murray.