"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Dealing With War Crime Investigations Would Be Uncomfortable And... Icky
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I guess disbarment is somewhere between a slap on the wrist and a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. But it certainly isn't the thorough investigation of the three Bush Regime shills from the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility. Remember when the far right was shrieking about the martyrdom of Scooter Libby? This would be at least as ugly and it makes the cowardly, self-serving Democrats cringe and cower. All the carefully orchestrated headlines yesterday were along the lines of the NY Times'Inquiry Suggests No Charges and the Wall Street Journal's Justice Likely To Urge No Prosections: nothing to see here; move along please.
It looks like the Justice Department will recommend turning the cases over to The Hague's International War Crimes Tribunal local bar associations for possible disciplinary actions-- meaning anything from going to bed without dinner to, if the general public screams loudly enough, disbarment for John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge. All three wrote and signed memos justifying torture and encouraging others to think that criminal activities were legal.
But there's more. Bradbury was kind of in charge of the Bush Regime DOJ "investigation" and was almost certainly tampering with it, as was Yoo. In yesterday's Washington Post Carrie Johnson didn't even mention that when she reported how ex-members the former criminal outfit ironically known as the Bush Department of Justice were rallying around their colleagues, at the incitement of Yoo's and Bybee's attorneys, and urging gold stars on their permanent records instead of wrist slaps.
Former Bush administration officials have launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to urge Justice Department leaders to soften an ethics report criticizing lawyers who blessed harsh detainee interrogation tactics, according to two sources familiar with the efforts.
And in today's Washington Post the same Ms. Johnson breaks the good news: that even ersatz justice is dead and none of these outrageous criminals would get even a slap on the wrist. Yes, despite how serious the findings are against Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury, the system has been neatly fixed so that none will face any kind of retribution whatsoever, unless being vilified by Jonathan Turley (see below), Rachel Maddow, Firedoglake and possibly even Stephen Colbert is the kind of retribution that fits their crimes.
I'm all for Democrats who are courageous enough-- like Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)-- to stand up and say, unambivalently "NO!" to torture, where Republican shitheads are dancing around and looking for shades of gray. But today's best blow against torture and torture apologists goes to Dickipedia for their newest entry: former Bush Regime torture attorney John Yoo:
John Choon Yoo (born June 10, 1967) is an American attorney, former U.S. Justice Department official, Berkeley law professor, writer of memos, foremost authority on routing the U.S. Constitution, alleged war criminal, and an all-around good person. It is important to note however that—though it contradicts all rational reason-- in this article, "an all-around good person" has been redefined narrowly to mean "a dick."
Yoo is an eminent scholar of the document known as the U.S. Constitution, though this refers specifically to an edition of it that is missing several amendments and has been integrated with entries from Vice President Dick Cheney's bedtime dream journal.
Having devoted his life to the common dick practice of redefining words to mean something different and more convenient, Yoo, during the course of one business day, redefined "acceptable behavior for a civilized nation" to "pretty much anything up to the reenactment of an Eli Roth movie."
Yoo's work is chiefly responsible for the supposed legal justification the Bush administration asserted for the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," which is like a crazy corporate marketing-speak term for when the vendor fake drowns the consumer.
In his professional world, Yoo's work has caused him to stand out as a shining dick, which, considering this is the legal community we're talking about, is a major achievement in and of itself.
...While at the White House, Yoo authored a series of notorious memos that other people put their names on. In them, Yoo developed newer and narrower definitions for the concepts of "torture" and "habeas corpus" as well as, not to mention, the terms "ethics," "morals," and (from the look of him) "a modest lunch."
Lately, anonymous friends-- i.e., sneaky Mormons-- have been claiming that 9th Circuit Appellate Court Judge Jay "The Torture Lawyer" Bybee didn't really write the rah-rah-torture memo he signed and that he only signed it because Cheney might have tortured him if he didn't. Yoo, on the other hand, is proud to have taken a stand that puts him in the ranks of all the heroes of authoritarianism from Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Marcos, Atilla and Caligula all the way down the shoot to Hitler and Cheney.
Of course Jay "The Torture Guy" Bybee needs to be removed from the bench, but he probably won't be, because Americans LIKE torture
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Judge Jay "The Torture Guy" didn't get where he is today by being either decent or honorable, any more than Sunshine Desserts baron C.J. (the ineffable John Barron) did. Here Reggie Perrin (the great Leonard Rossiter), well on his way to a nervous breakdown, sets out to demand a holiday from his boss. Instead, C.J. offers an afternoon off, from which he assures Reggie he'll "return a different man." "That's what Mrs. C.J. and I do," he says, "and we return different men."
by Ken
I may have been unfair to Pat Leahy. I noted that the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman on Tuesday said to reporters, about Judge Jay "The Torture Guy" Bybee (as Ryan Grim reported on Huffpost):
The decent and honorable thing for him to do would be to resign. And if he is a decent and honorable person, he will resign.
As much as I admire Senator Pat, so often he talks the talk, the good talk, the exactly right talk, but then somehow vaporizes when it comes to fighting the fight. And so my first thought was: Oh Pat, you dreamer! In this lost world of decency and honor with which you're apparently in telepathic contact, of course Judge Jay would resign. However, we live in the real world, where the Jayman knows that he didn't get on the bench by doing anything that could be called by the most charitable stretch either decent or honorable, and so why on earth would he be tempted to commit a decent or honorable act that would get him off the bench?
And all I could think of was C.J., Reggie's old boss at Sunshine Desserts in the immortal Britcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Why, if anyone had had the temerity to mention decency or honor in C.J.'s hearing, you just know he would have responded, "I didn't get where I am today by being decent or honorable."
In fairness to Senator Leahy, though, it turns out that he wasn't being quite so spontaneously dreamy in making his appeal to Judge Jay's decency and honor. He was in fact responding to Sen. Orrin Hatch's Monday rejection of the idea of impeachment, declaring that Jay the Torture Guy is "one of the most honorable people you'll ever meet."
Say what? One of the most honorable people I'll ever meet???
Um, no, Senator Hatch. It may well be that "Honk If You Love Torture" Jay is one of the most honorable people you've ever met. I've watched your all-too-public career for a long time now, and it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the sleazily opportunistic Torture Guy is a class act by the standard of the peeps you hang with. But that's not much of a standard.
What we are learning about Judge Jay's record heading the Justice Dept.'s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) -- and by this I mean his willingness, or rather eagerness, to give the war criminals and Constitution-shredders of the Bush regime whatever legal cover they craved on torture or anything else -- is about as far from "honorable" as you can get. The word that pops to mind is nauseating.
IRONIC SIDEBAR: SPEAKING OF THE OLC
Along with defenses of the absolutely indefensible Jay the Torture Guy, what we're hearing from the Loony Right now is continued character assassination of President Obama's nominee to head the incredibly important OLC, whose charter is to provide the administration with the most accurate and authoritative legal opinions obtainable by the best legal minds, in other words the exact opposite of what the Bush regime sought, and got, from the fraudulent, craven, ideological-hack, butt-licking-careerist shysters it stocked the OLC with.
By all accounts (from non-insane people, that is), Obama designee Dawn Johnsen really is one of the most honorable people you'll ever meet, and she possesses one of the finest legal minds. (And by this I don't mean the kind of "fine legal mind" we've always been told Supreme Court Justice Nino Scalia possesses, which -- as anybody who reads his whacked-out opinions knows -- is in fact a cesspool of ultra-right-wing bigotry and prejudices underlying a borderline, if not across-the-border, sociopathic contempt for anyone who isn't rich and powerful.) And yet the Right, as currently personified by one of the truly nuttiest and vilest hacks to befoul the Senate, the loathsome James Inhofe, and scum-sucking Iowa Rep. Steve King, without acknowledging the role played by the Bush regimista OLC in laying waste to the Constitution and overturning our system of laws, continues to vilify Johnsen.
But I digress. Should Judge Jay be gotten the hell off the bench? Of course! And as more behind-the-scenes muck from the slime-filled Bush DoJ oozes out, there's certainly a chance that the scumbag will reach his humiliation threshold and slither off behind whatever rock he originally emerged from.
My only reservation about the impeachment process as applied to Judge Jay is that we're talking now about something the judge did before he was put on the bench. That's all supposed to be handled in his confirmation hearings. Can it qualify now as "an impeachable offense"?
Senator Leahy may have answered this question, even though he wasn't addressing it directly, when he said in the same chinwag with reporters Tuesday:
The fact is, the Bush administration and Mr. Bybee did not tell the truth. If the Bush administration and Mr. Bybee had told the truth, he never would have been confirmed.
The guy can hardly earn a free pass for having concealed this crucial information. Former Nazi concentration-camp guards who failed to disclose this activity when they applied for entry to the U.S. were nevertheless subject to deportation.
The case against Judge Jay is already pretty damning, and I suspect it's only going to get worse. Nevertheless, I think there's a good chance he's going to beat the rap. Why? Because, as a wise listserv colleague reminded us the other day, the American public by and large isn't at all offended by the idea of torture, and in fact to a large degree thinks it's a fine idea for when we need life-saving information immediately from bad guys. They don't know how heavily the odds are stacked against torture yielding any information of value.
We are talking, yes, about the 24 model, the 24 mentality, and the 24 audience. Don't get me started on that! But when people of the supposed intelligence of "Holy Joe" Lieberman subscribe to this wacko crock (and you owe it to yourself to read David Neiwert's Tuesday Crooks and Liars post "Holy Joe still loves him some torture"), is it surprising that people who watch that unmitigated pile of crap -- the dumbest scripts in TV history backed up by the worst acting and direction (Reginald Perrin is not only way funnier but way more realistic, a veritable slice of life by comparison) -- have not the slightest sympathy when we lefties froth about torture?
Who's The Bigger Villain In The Bybee Case So Far-- Rahm Emanuel Or Dick Cheney?
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All the best civil libertarians and progressives went off the rails this weekend when Obama's incredibly sleazy and untrustworthy chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, went on ABC-TV to announce that the Obama administration would not only let CIA hands-on torturers off the hook, but wouldn't even prosecute those who ordered the torture nor the slimy lawyers who gave them the flimsy legalistic cover to do it. (Watch Emanuel espousing what now looks like his own opinion, rather than Obama's.) The president has been on cleanup duty over the mess Obama made ever since.
A report in today's NY Timescontradicts Emanuel and points out that Obama is leaving the door open "to creating a bipartisan commission that would investigate the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects, and he did not rule out taking action against the lawyers who fashioned the legal guidelines for the interrogations."
Mr. Obama said once again that he does not favor prosecuting C.I.A. operatives who used interrogation techniques that he has since banned. But as for lawyers or others who drew up the former policies allowing such techniques, he said it would be up to his attorney general to decide what to do, adding, “I don’t want to prejudge that.”
...On Sunday, Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said on the ABC News program “This Week” that “those who devised policy” also “should not be prosecuted.” But administration officials said Monday that Mr. Emanuel had meant the officials who ordered the policies carried out, not the lawyers who provided the legal rationale.
Three Bush administration lawyers who signed memos, John C. Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Steven G. Bradbury, are the subjects of a coming report by the Justice Department’s ethics office that officials say is sharply critical of their work. The ethics office has the power to recommend disbarment or other professional penalties or, less likely, to refer cases for criminal prosecution.
Senator Russ Feingold, who first warned the nation about Bybee when Bush was shoving him onto the 9th Circuit court of Appeals, was one of Emanuel's targets with his rogue comments on Sunday. Today Feingold must have been gratified to see Obama slap Emanuel down a little. “I am pleased that the president made clear that he has not ruled out investigations or prosecutions of those who authorized torture, or provided the legal justification for it. Horrible abuses were committed in the name of the American people, and we cannot look the other way, or just ‘move on.’ The final decision will be up to the attorney general and the president, but I urge the Justice Department to take this matter very seriously... The just released OLC memos, including the 2002 memo authored by Jay Bybee, are a disgrace. The idea that one of the architects of this perversion of the law is now sitting on the federal bench is very troubling. The memos offer some of the most explicit evidence yet that Mr. Bybee and others authorized torture and they suggest that grounds for impeachment can be made. Clearly, the Justice Department has the responsibility to investigate this matter further. As a Senator, I would be a juror in any impeachment trial so I don't want to reach a conclusion until all the evidence is before me."
Today I was on a conference call with the leading candidate to replace Hilda Solis in CA-32, Judy Chu. In response to a question about accountability, she was unhesitating that she supports impeaching Bybee.
Andrew Sullivan wonders if Dick Cheney is starting to panic and Chris Cillizza seems shocked in today's Washington Post that Cheney (approval rating in the teens-- but less than Paris Hilton's) is continuing his one-man assault on President Obama. Cheney is screaming about "the handshake" and going off the deep end in regard to the torture memos. Although it may be good for ratings on Fox, Republicans are appalled.
"He is a face of the past," said one Republican consultant who spoke on the condition he not be named. "A face of conflict and too polarizing. So, not a good face of the party."
Cheney is largely unpopular among voters generally and particularly independent voters that proved so critical to Obama's across-the-board victory last fall. A late March Gallup poll showed that just three in ten voters had a favorable opinion of Cheney while 63 percent felt unfavorably toward him. Those numbers are consistent with where Gallup has shown Cheney for the last three years-- a period long enough to demonstrate a hardening of opinion toward the former vice president.
Crooks and Liars has clips of him running his crazy mouth on Hannity's show yesterday. What a disgrace to America!
Are Congressional Democrats Rubber Stamps For The Obama Administration, The Same Way The Craven Repugs Were For Bush's Regime?
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Short answer: well see. There is no valid, reasonable excuse-- none whatsoever-- for not holding perps accountable for breaking the laws regarding torture. If Obama wants to pardon them, that's his prerogative but these people must stand trial-- especially the ones who gave the orders and the ones who gave flimsy legalistic cover to the torturers. Rahm Emanuel has certainly shown himself to be one of the sleaziest and most disreputable operators in our political system. Not even a Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay is worse. For him to go on TV and come down as squarely opposed to prosecuting even the order givers should make any decent person even more sure that those who participated in this kind of behavior must be brought before the bar of Justice.
Saturday we looked at this sordid mess and passed along the editorial suggestion of the NY Times that the first action should be the immediate impeachment of Jay Bybee, the disgraceful Mormon right wing fanatic (and vicious homophobe) Bush appointed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Yesterday I was delighted, though not surprised, to read a statement by Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, explaining why Bybee should be impeached.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is the largest in the country and the Senate should have resisted his appointment with more vigor. After the nomination was turned down-- or at least not acted on-- Bush resubmitted it in 2003. All twelve Republican rubber stamps on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted in favor and were joined by 2 Democratic collaborators, Schumer and Kohl. Schumer cited Bybee's "excellence, moderation, diversity" as the reason he gave Bush another frightening far right extremist maniac on the federal bench. (Six Democrats voted against confirming this dangerous extremist.) Less than a week later it went to the full Senate and was approved 74-19. The 19 Democrats who stood up against tyranny on that day were
Barbara Boxer (D-CA) Robert Byrd (D-WV) Hillary Clinton (D-NY) Jon Corzine (D-NJ) Mark Dayton (D-MN) Richard Durbin (D-IL) Russ Feingold (D-WI) Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) Tom Harkin (D-IA) Daniel Inouye (D-HI) Ted Kennedy (D-MA) Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) Carl Levin (D-MI) Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) Patty Murray (D-WA) Jack Reed (D-RI) Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) Ron Wyden (D-OR)
It shouldn't surprise you that the Democrats who are currently members of Evan Bayh's anti-Obama bloc were delighted to skip across the aisle and vote for this murderous piece of human detritus, joining every single Republican. The Bayh Bloc's hall of shame members from March 13, 2003: Evan Bayh (IN), Tom Carper (DE), Herb Kohl (WI), Mary Landrieu (LA), Blanche Lincoln (AR), both Nelsons (FL & NE), and Mark Pryor (AR).
A couple of other Democrats' names who voted to confirm Bybee that I want to mention-- for those who like keeping names in their memories: Max Baucus (MT), Tom Daschle (SD), Chris Dodd (CT), Pat Leahy (VT), Harry Reid (NV), Jay Rockefeller (WV) and Chuck Schumer (NY).
Before his colleagues voted to confirm this war criminal as a federal judge, Russ Feingold made a speech opposing Bybee's elevation. He found Bybee's unwillingness to answer questions disturbing enough to vote against the nomination.
On more than 20 occasions, Mr. Bybee refused to answer a question, claiming over and over again that as an attorney in the Department of Justice he could not comment on any advice that he gave at any time. This is unfortunately becoming a very familiar refrain of nominees before the Judiciary Committee.
...There is an extensive body of legal work both written by or at least signed off on by this nominee, in this case unpublished Office of Legal Counsel opinions. The administration and the nominee are acting as if they are irrelevant to the confirmation process. A nominee cannot simply claim that he or she will follow Supreme Court precedent and ask us to take that assurance on faith, when there are written records that may help us evaluate that pledge, but the nominee refuses to make those records available.
Only three OLC opinions had been made publicly available since Mr. Bybee's confirmation to head that office. That is extraordinary, given that 1,187 OLC opinions dating back to 1996 are publicly available. This is a dramatic change in the Department's practice, a change that did not occur until this nominee was confirmed to be Assistant Attorney General for the office. While there may be some justification for releasing fewer opinions since 9/11, the wholesale refusal to share with the public and Congress important OLC decisions affecting a wide range of legal matters is, to say the least, troublesome.
But the failure to make OLC opinions available to the Judiciary Committee during the consideration of a nominee for a seat on a circuit court is unacceptable... The administration should be able to agree to an acceptable procedure to allow the Judiciary Committee to review Mr. Bybee's OLC opinions. Given the recent history of many OLC opinions being made public, it is hard to believe that there are no opinions authored by Mr. Bybee that could be disclosed without damaging the deliberative process. Indeed, it is very hard to give credence to the idea that OLC's independence would be compromised by the release of some selection of the opinions of interest to members of the Judiciary Committee or the Senate.
And now we know exactly what the Bush Regime was hiding and what Senator Feingold and the other 18 Democrats who voted against confirmation sensed in their bones. Back to Congressman Nadler's statement:
“While I applaud the Obama administration for releasing these torture memos in the spirit of openness and transparency, the memos' alarming content requires further action. These memos, without a shadow of a doubt, authorized torture and gave explicit instruction on how to carry it out, all the while carefully attempting to maintain a legal fig leaf.
“These memos make it abundantly clear that the Bush administration engaged in torture. Because torture is illegal under American law-- as the U.S. is a signatory to the Convention Against Torture-- we are legally required to investigate and, when appropriate, to prosecute those responsible for these crimes.
“I commend President Obama for his unequivocal rejection of torture and for his resolve to move forward. The President's intentions are honorable, but don't go far enough. All history teaches us that simply shining a light on criminal acts without holding the responsible people accountable will not prevent repetition of those acts.
“I have previously urged Attorneys General Gonzalez and Mukasey to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the torture abuses of the Bush administration, and now I will convey that same necessity to President Obama and Attorney General Holder. We sorely need an independent investigation that will provide accountability for these terrible crimes. This investigation should not be a witch-hunt to punish those rank-and-file C.I.A. operatives who acted in good faith on Justice Department instructions. At the very least, those who wrote and authorized the memos knowing full well that they were instructing others to torture must be held accountable to the law.
“We must have a criminal investigation if the U.S. is to reclaim its moral authority and prevent repetition of these crimes.
“As Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights said yesterday, ‘Whether or not to prosecute law breakers is not a political decision. Laws were broken and crimes were committed. If we are truly a nation of laws... a prosecutor needs to be appointed and the decisions regarding the guilt of those involved in the torture program should be decided in a court of law.’
“Furthermore, the revelations contained in these memos make it abundantly clear that we need additional Congressional oversight hearings on this matter. We intend to hold such hearings.
“Finally, I particularly want to thank the American Civil Liberties Union for their role in bringing these memos to light and for their vigilant efforts to ensure that the United States government does not engage in torture.”
Now we need to watch and see which members of Congress are willing to stand up for the Constitution and for the honor and integrity of our nation-- even if it means going against the political stratagems of their party's president. The Republicans were unwilling to do it for the last 8 years and they dug us a hole that looks remarkably like a grave. Let's see how many Democrats have the guts that Jerrold Nadler just demonstrated. I'll be especially interested to see how the Democrats who voted to confirm Bybee-- particularly Schumer, Dodd, Leahy and Reid-- handle the move to impeach Bybee and correct the really bad judgment they made on that faitful day in 2003. [UPDATE: Leahy just called for Bybee to resign.]
Last night it was revealed on Rachel Maddow's show that Attorney General Holder may not go along with Obama and Emanuel on giving out "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards to all the torturers, let alone the masterminds of the torture policy. And then there was this commitment to Justice from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). And this morning the NY Times is reporting that pressure is mounting to at least let Holder do his job. And who will stand up for Obama-- the obstructionist Republicans who oppose him on everything else? Interestingly, the Times story contradicts Emanuel's proclamation on TV yesterday that no one would be prosecuted no matter how heinous their crimes:
And while Mr. Obama vowed not to prosecute C.I.A. officers for acting on legal advice, on Monday aides did not rule out legal sanctions for the Bush lawyers who developed the legal basis for the use of the techniques.
