Homeland Security

I’ve read the now-notorious Aug. 1, 2002, memo by federal judge and then-Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee to CIA acting General Counsel John Rizzo. The Top Secret Memo includes 18 single-spaced pages (mildly redacted), but it suggests more than it states. It purports to be a legal opinion about the applicability of 18 USC 2340A (the prohibition against torture) to proposed investigative techniques, waterboarding being the most notorious. Relying on “oral advice” provided by investigators who wished to move into the “increased pressure phase” of their interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a high-ranking al Qaeda operative, the memo provides the CIA with the legal OK to proceed with the proposed “techniques.” Read more...

There has been much discussion about the implications of the Bush administration’s torture policy: What is it, who is responsible for it, was it appropriate and legal, is it effective, what should be the consequences?

The word torture means different things to different people. Here are descriptions of examples of real-life torture, described by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in its opinion last week in the most recent extreme rendition case. Read more...

Before you read any further — watch the video by clicking right here. Watch it several times if you want. Then come back here and share your thoughts with the entire class.

... Back now? What did you think?

If you are a boring, knee-jerky, off-the-shelf Obama-hater, you absolutely loved it. You have already made up your mind that Barrack HUSSEIN Obama is a one-worlding-lefty-socialist-pinko-traitor who wasn’t even born here in the U.S. Should never have been elected president of the United States, am I right? You love the video so much you already sent the thing around to all your similarly brilliant and sophisticated friends. Read more...

Looking at the first 100 days of President Obama's administration, A.B. Stoddard runs down the successes and failures of his presidency thus far, and takes some Obama grades from viewers.

Well, Dick Cheney is almost pathological. As we all know, he cherry-picked intelligence as he led us into war in Iraq — from yellowcake uranium to chemical, biological and nuclear weapons hanging over our heads; from metal tubes to mobile labs, you name it, he manufactured it.

Now Cheney is at it again, flailing around on Fox when he is not closeting himself in his bat cave writing his book to justify the disasters of the last eight years. But what I love is the transition from “We don’t torture” to “Well, torture worked!” And now he wants two memos released, one 12 pages and one 19 pages, to justify his actions. So Cheney wants once more to cherry-pick to try and make his point. Read more...

It seems to this observer that the four questions being raised about torture have clear answers. Only the experts and commentators are arguing about them. The public is not. The political leaders ought to lead, not speculate as to what the public desires, and do the right thing.

1. Torture is Illegal and Immoral. The practices should be stopped and condemned. This is the case. Let’s forget the what-if-your-child-were-kidnapped scenarios. They do not help set public policy, ever. The administration has taken the correct position by outlawing torture as an “investigative” technique. Read more...

The following appears originally in The Washington Times of Monday, April 27.

I was planning to write today's column assessing President Obama's first 100 days. But in the middle of writing that column on a quiet Saturday afternoon (I was going to give him an A-minus — surprise), my phone rang and it was former President Bill Clinton, whom I first met in fall 1970, a few months after I graduated from Yale Law School. Read more...

Attorney General Eric Holder should complete a full report about the conduct that would legally be called torture, about the facts of the cases — from the legality of the acts committed to whether major terrorist plots were foiled by this — and make recommendations regarding prosecution. Until then the president and his entire administration should declare a complete moratorium on all public opining about this subject.

Whatever is right, the president has lost control over the issue. He has now reversed his views, in a matter of days, first on whether prosecution of higher-ups should be pursued and second on the merits of a Truth Commission. The torture proponents on the right — and while they deny it they are torture proponents under commonly accepted law — are in full-throated anger mode. And the issue has become hyper-politicized while most people on all sides lack many key facts of the matter. Read more...

After the abuses at Abu Ghraib were revealed, The New York Times and other major newspapers and the networks opened their op-ed pages to a congenial and brotherly discussion of torture. Torture then had binary parts: those sort-of-for and those sort-of-against — this is a sort of Hegelian dialectic ensuring the establishment of torture in one realm or another and to a degree to which it has never existed in our republic before. It is a complete compromise of character by the weakling, cowardly and appeasing voice of the horde, today's mainstream journalists who stood on the front of M1A1 Abrams battle tanks and M2A3 Bradley fighting vehicles, hair in the wind, leading the invasion of Iraq. Read more...