The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

You
may have missed it last week, given that the explosions in Texas and Boston required
all of the available oxygen in the media, but a bipartisan blue-ribbon panel published
its conclusion that President George W. Bush and his top advisers bear
“ultimate responsibility” for authorizing torture in violation of domestic and international
law.

The Task Force
was sponsored by the Constitution
Project, a legal and advocacy group. The Task Force was headed by former
congressmen James R. Jones, D-Oklahoma, an ex-ambassador to Mexico, and Asa
Hutchinson, R-Arkansas, who also served as an under-secretary of Homeland
Security during the Bush administration.

Other
members were prominent Americans from the fields of military, academia, law,
ethics and diplomacy – including former FBI Director William Sessions and
longtime senior diplomat Thomas Pickering, Brigadier General (Ret.) David
Irvine and Lieutenant General Claudia Kennedy. Here are the
bios of the panel members.

The panel concluded
that:

• “Torture occurred in many
  instances and across a wide range of theaters”

• There is “no firm or persuasive
  evidence” that the use of such techniques yielded “significant information
  of value”

• “The nation’s highest officials
  bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of
  torture”

•  “Publicly acknowledging this grave error,
  however belatedly, may mitigate some of those consequences and help undo
  some of the damage to our reputation at home and abroad”

The New
York Times indicates that the core of the report, however, may be an
appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why
the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which
similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture
by American officials when used by other countries.

At a press conference
at the National Press Club in Washington, co-chair Hutchinson said:

Hutchinson went on to
say: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The United States is in
a difficult moral position and is subject to criticism when it criticizes
another nation for engaging in torture and then justifies the same conduct using
national security as its argument.

The Task Force concluded
that after 9/11, the nation’s highest officials approved actions for CIA and
Defense personnel based upon legal guidance that has since been repudiated. And
in the Task Force’s opinion, the Bush Administration relied not only on a very
narrow legal definition of torture, but also on representations by the
government about how the techniques would be implemented, that later proved
inaccurate.

The most important decision was to
declare the Geneva Convention did not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban captives in
Afghanistan or Guantánamo.

Hutchinson concludes:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The
question is, what should the American people and their government do now with this
information?

The logical
answer would seem to be: Prosecute Bush and his cronies (or turn them over to
an international tribunal if the US legal system can’t do the job). After all,
everyone, including the current and all former presidents, possibly even Mr.
Bush himself, would agree with the principle that “no man is above the law.”

For
instance, we’re told that Pvt. Bradley Manning may have had good intentions in
exposing US government wrongdoing to WikiLeaks, but he still must be punished
for taking the law into his own hands. The only question seems to be whether he
should be imprisoned for 20 years or life.

The US
soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison had to face justice. Eleven were convicted
at court martial, and two enlisted personnel – Charles Graner and Lynndie
England – were sentenced to ten and three years in prison, respectively. A few
higher-level officers had their military careers derailed.

But the
buck stopped there. It didn’t extend to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, White House
counsel Alberto Gonzales, Vice President Cheney and President Bush. They simply
engaged circular excuse-making, claiming that they had relied on
Justice Department legal guidance and thus their own actions really weren’t
criminal at all.

The Report
challenges that line of defense by detailing how the Bush administration’s
lawyers offered up “acrobatic” legal opinions to justify the acts that
constituted torture. Lawyers from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal
Counsel, particularly John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who collaborated closely with senior
administration officials in choreographing these legal gymnastics.

In other
words, Bush’s team had arranged its own legal opinions that empowered the
President do whatever he wanted.

The Yoo/Bybee
legal opinions gave the President carte
blanche by citing his supposed “plenary powers,” meaning that he
could do literally anything he wished during “wartime,” even a war as
nebulously defined as the “war on terror.”

Yet, the panel’s Report demands no
meaningful accountability from Bush and his top aides, as former Ambassador
Pickering made clear in a WaPo
Op-ed on Friday.

So, the
logical, legal remedy is unthinkable. If the Holder Justice Department moved
against Mr. Bush and other ex-officials, the Washington Establishment, from the
Republican Party to the mainstream news media to much of the Democratic Party, there
would be warnings about the terrible precedent being set that could mean that
each time the White House changes hands the new administration would then “go
after” the former occupants.

This Report
from the Constitution Project can declare that torture is incompatible with
democracy, but if the President can torture anyone he chooses and then walk
away and celebrate his presidential library and pose for the cover of “Parade”
magazine, we are not living in a real democracy.

When
the founders wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights, not only were they
telling us that the ends do not
justify the means, the founders were also telling us that the MEANS themselves
ARE the ends.