Not Torturing People Would Be Disrespectful to Bush...
The Washington Post has more today on bad apples like Rumsfeld and Gonzales, "Military Lawyers Fought Policy on Interrogations". One passage that particularly caught my eye:
A law enacted in 1994 bars torture by U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world. But the Pentagon working group's 2003 report, prepared under the supervision of general counsel William J. Haynes II, said that "in order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign . . . [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority."
I don't even know what to say about that logic. Torture is torture, whether or not you consider yourself "the good guy." So it's super-ironic that one of the justifications Bush gives for the war is that Saddam used to torture people. You can't just say "well, torture is wrong, so wrong that I had to bomb this country... EXCEPT WHEN..." Torture is torture.
1 Comments:
The Pentagon memo is probably correct, Mikhaela. There's not a lot of constitutional limitation on a president's authority to make specific military decisions, even in the face of specific legislative limitations. That's what makes President Bush himself so appalling -- the Constitution more or less presumes that the president will conduct himself responsibly in war, and gives him enormous latitude to do as he pleases. The Constitution just wasn't written for someone as morally bankrupt as Bush.
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