How ridiculous is Obama's opening the door to prosecuting Bush administration attorneys for giving legal advice on "harsh interrogation"?
So ridiculous that Roger Cohen, doubtless one of the looniest members of the left's journalistic opinion squad, says that prosecutions are out of the question.
For those blessedly unfamiliar with Roger Cohen, we urge two steps. One is not to confuse him with Richard Cohen, whose work we used to pillory but now ignore as inconsequential. The other is to peruse James Taranto's recent catalog of Cohen's outrageous pronouncements.
So, Mr. President, here's the deal: when even the hard left says prosecutions are out of the question, even as they praise your confessional world tour featuring gracious greetings of totalitarian dictators, you need to back off from criminalizing policy differences.
4 comments:
I keep seeing the phrase "policy differences" used in connection with this discussion of torture - and I think what we're talking about amounts to much more than simple policy differences. We're talking about the use of interrogation techniques for which we prosecuted war criminals after World War II - techniques that we referred to as torture when they were used on John McCain (although he was never waterboarded). If we have indeed tortured - and the released memos leave no questions that we have indeed done so - then my understanding is that we have broken international law and violated treaty agreements. These are not mere policy differences - it's a discussion of whether we will prosecute our own people for actions for which we have condemned and prosecuted others.
Actually, Jake, there's an argument to be made that the differences outweigh the similarities in your comparisons. The memos are in the view of many not at all clear on the points you mention; quite the opposite in fact.
When one adds that all this was done with the knowledge and consent of Congress through the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, it's very difficult to single out attorneys who wrote legal opinions in good faith as the scapegoats for a policy that was pursued under the prior administration.
There are simply significant details that you're not considering here, from the way that the opinions were empirically based on extensive experimental data from the Army SERE program to the fact that leaving a person in a cell with insects is far different from starving people and breaking their bones (the kind of treatment dished out at the Hanoi Hilton).
There are no treaty agreements with people who fight under no flag, like Al Qaida. In the history of Western Civilization, bandits and pirates have been treated differently than soldiers, precisely to contain the effects of banditry and piracy.
We cannot accept your analogies. They are far too imprecise and--we cannot put it otherwise--informed more by rhetoric than fact.
You will doubtless disagree. But here's the point: the disagreement shows that this is in essence a political question, to be settled by political means. There's no consensus that a crime has been committed. There's your policy difference.
Jake, McCain is hammering Obama on this. He doesn't share your view of the commensurability of his North Vietnamese captors and the Bush CIA: http://buzznewsroom.com/politics/mccain-rips-obama-torture-probe/.
If you think US politics are difficult, try those of South Africa at the moment! Read what I have to say about Zuma on http://musicaltraveller.blogspot.com
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