What the Client Wanted To Hear First, so the official story has gone, there were the lawyers, people with names like John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Stephen Bradbury. Consulted by their clients in the Oval Office, the CIA, the Pentagon and the Vice President’s Office about whether Muslim men could be imprisoned without […]
On Advice of Counsel In discussing whether we should prosecute the people who ordered or committed torture, I’ve been drawing some artificial distinctions for clarity. I’ve contrasted the working torturers, the folks who slammed other folks into walls and poured water over their airways, with the Pentagon and Langley brass who merely ordained […]
Various Circles of Hell Jack L. B. Gohn Because of the agonizingly slow leakage of information concerning the previous administration’s practices of internment and interrogation of Muslim men, it is only recently that the Central Intelligence Agency component has come into focus. When the Abu Ghraib photos were first leaked to […]
A lawyer so brilliant he could not recognize when his own advice was bad: for his client, the President, and for the country. Disbar John Yoo.
In the global war on terror or, as the Bush Administration likes to call it, the GWOT, the U.S. aspires to the situation of a National League team in interleague play — relaxed rules. This time we consider three aspects of the relaxed GWOT away game we are playing these days: foreign assassinations, extraordinary rendition, and prisoner export.
But we had better be prepared for the consequences. Someone, somewhere, is going to try us, quite seriously, for war crimes. And somewhere else, someone is going to commit war crimes against our soldiers because we fail to recognize their own combatants as POWs. And it won’t be pretty.
Without the aid of the courts, Congress is no match for the Executive. Presidents decide, period. Congress, outgunned by the Executive and deserted by the Judiciary, goes along. The Framers would have been dismayed.