By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Rory O’Connor has an excellent post that illustrates how torture has warped the thinking of otherwise sensible folks like Slate’s Jacob Weisberg and the New York Times’ Tom Friedman.
He also takes on the Philadelphia Inquirer’s bizarro decision to give a column to torture advocate John Yoo.
Prosecuting George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others for torture-related war crimes would be madness, and President Obama clearly doesn’t want to do it. But torture is serious business. What should we do?
At ThePhoenix.com, civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate shows us the way out.
In my latest for The Guardian, I dismiss the notion — put forth by the dean of the Massachusetts School of Law — to put President Bush and other top officials on trial for war crimes. But if Nuremberg II isn’t the answer, surely there must be some way of holding him — and us — accountable for the past seven and a half years.
Earlier this month, civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate had this to say on his blog at ThePhoenix.com about Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s testimony regarding waterboarding:
[A]cknowledging that the CIA’s torturers might have been acting in good faith — that they believed the lawyers when the lawyers told them certain highly coercive interrogation techniques were legal — hardly ends the inquiry. Why are these lawyers not being investigated in order to determine whether they wrote their legal opinions in good faith, or instead made up fanciful legal theories to appease the administration’s interest in taking the gloves off when it came to dealing with suspected terrorists?
And here we go, from today’s Washington Post:
An internal watchdog office at the Justice Department is investigating whether Bush administration lawyers violated professional standards by issuing legal opinions that authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, officials confirmed yesterday.
Mukasey had a good reputation coming in, but was craven in his confirmation hearings and has been overly cautious in his subsequent congressional appearances. It looks like we’re going to learn what he’s really made of.
Let’s see, now. If Attorney General Michael Mukasey refuses to investigate CIA torture because government lawyers had approved those practices as being legal, doesn’t it then follow that he — actually, someone else — should investigate the lawyers? That’s what Harvey Silverglate proposes at ThePhoenix.com.