just goes to show you they knew it was wrong.

torture is illegal and Obama granted unofficial immunitypardon almost as soon as he took office.

That illegal torture occurred, at home or in black holes and "extraordinary rendition" sites abroad, (gee, thanks, Assad) under the last three administrations, and members of Congress of both of the two largest political parties allowed it, doesn't change the illegality of it one tiny bit. Nor would granting a formal pardon prove anything new about the illegality of torture. It might, however, seem to exonerate those who participated. So, I think it can do no good whatever and may do harm.

I support the ACLU, but think Romero is wrong on this one.

Link to that doc? Thanks.

Words to that effect.

He did not want to pursue it, and you think that's a good thing?

of limitations keep running, didn't he?

IMHO he asked for the pardon because it's more likely then a trial.

Last edited Thu Dec 11, 2014, 04:26 AM - Edit history (1)

perception. Outside the Beltway, people reviled Ford for granting Nixon a pardon (probably part of the deal Poppy Bush made with Nixon on behalf of the Republican Party to get Nixon to resign and end the damage to the Party of having the Watergate news stories, daily hearings and lawsuits continue--JMO).

Inside the Beltway, they know Ford supposedly carried on his person until the day he died a copy of something saying that accepting a pardon is evidence of guilt. I would quibble with that. Maybe it's just evidence of not wanting to serve your sentence, or evidence of wanting to vote again someday. However, that is what Ford clung to.

In public perception, though, I think a pardon means some kind of exoneration, or at least redemption. And members of Bushco could always refuse it and thereby thwart even the inside the Beltway rationale for offering a pardon that no one ever asked for!

No president in history has been prosecuted and at least it will keep the Republicans from trying to make Bush into another Repub hero like they did with Reagan who also was guilty yet never pardoned by Bush Sr.

guilty or that you were not guilty of anything really bad. And it doesn't prove a damn thing except that someone took it into his or her head to grant you a pardon. They never sought one and, at this point, they don't need one. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they refused it.

No president in history has been prosecuted

And? Does that mean no President ever should be? For anything? (I hope no one cites Lincoln suspending habeas corpus. The Constitution allowed that.)

We sure prosecuted the Germans, didn't we, down to judges. How bad does that make us look? We'll go into other countries to prosecute people, but not take out our own trash--and if anyone else tries to prosecute, we'll make sure they don't?

Among many other things, they violated a multinational treaty as well as domestic law. How damaging is that--or should it be--to our ability to get other nations to sign treaties?

open for future use of torture. Obama has said a lot but nothing that warns anyone in the future to stop.

By calling this a crime and the perpetrators guilty it warns future torturers that the Bush administration was guilty of a real crime. (Already all we hear from the tortures and much of the media is that it was something that had to be done.)

They also have not suggested that any pardon be given IF we can get them to trial but that does not seem to be going to happen. If we cannot get convictions in a trial then something has to be done to close that door to the future. Make it clear that it was a crime and that the administration is guilty. That is what they want to use the pardon for.

should ask Adolf Eichmann.

They would argue that Israel should have turned Eichmann over to the World Court/UN, or turned home over to the West German authorities. Although the crimes were committed against the Jewish people, they were not committed in Israel, and they had neither the jurisdiction nor the legal authority to execute him.

Note: Personally, I think the bastard got less than he deserved.

I know you didn't say it was, but I thought the point was important enough to mention anyway.

It's the same reason the Senate granted immunity to Oliver North. It was the only way to get to the truth. If we want to know the truth, we should issue pardons, but only on the condition that the pardoned must agree to appear before a bi-partisan committee of Senators and Congressmen, and must answer all questions put to them truthfully, under penalty of perjury.

it might be worth it.

I watched Monica Goodling in Congressional hearings after she got immunity. She did as much umming and hemming and hawing and dodging and back pedaling as anyone I have ever seen testify. If she told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in those hearings, I'll eat my keyboard.

Even if someone has immunity, they still have pride, maybe a career to try to salvage, and they still have loyalty to those they would rather not implicate.

There's theory and there's reality.

And, you can grant offical immunity without granting a pardon.

long time ago.

Makes the US lose the moral high ground over people like Assad or ISIS.

To this day, I can't understand how a guy who's usually dead on target like Sam Harris could think torture to get info to save lives was morally justified.

Or even made operational sense. For every guy tortured by the good guys (hopefully, us), the bad guys get golden justifications to recruit thousands.

As far as we know, Clinton began the practice of "extraordinary rendition" for purposes of having people tortured overseas by people like Assad and both Presidents who followed Clinton engaged in it. Clinton also had the option of drone killing.

We can pretend otherwise all we want, but the only real question is whether extraordinary rendition began even before Clinton.

Let's say a US officer caught an Algerian GIA terrorist in Europe in the 90s.

Do you give the terrorist the benefit of US/European habeas corpus and -comparatively- cosy jails, or do you give him to the Algerians against a share of the product of interrogations?

Not so obvious moral choice.

another nation because of the limits US law places on US government with regard to torture. Otherwise, we could have "interrogated" them here. You can call it interrogation all you want. We flew them from here to another to be tortured. So, I am not sure what your example has do with extraordinary rendition.

Besides, the US found ways not to give alleged terrorists the benefit of US law. You know that. Besides, you can turn over a prison to a foreign nation without asking that nation to torture him or her.

And torture is torture, regardless of the efforts of the US Executive Branch to evade US law. The morality does not change because we ask Assad to do it for us. Or send our prisoners to a black hole we control, like Bagram. Or put a prisoner on a US naval ship to be tortured. Geography has nothing to do with morality. Neither does having someone else do your dirty work because you're trying to protect yourself. Indeed, the latter is more immoral.

Torture is wrong, ineffective and inefficient.
- wrong, for obvious reasons
- ineffective, because it doesn't work on fanatics
- inefficient, because it helps recruit thousands more for the enemy

A rendition is more debatable
If you catch a foreign fanatic on US soil busy setting up terrorist cells, jail him in the US, he'll spend decades reading the Quran and being hailed as a hero, martyr, saint, whatever.
Render him to his country of origin and you save money and effort, he loses his hero mystique and he might give info to the foreign interrogators.

My position might not be morally consistent or praiseworthy, but at least, I suppose you can grant me there is a difference between the wo processes.

a crime to another country where torture is legal. It is NOT sending a foreign fanatic home. It DOES involve torture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition
Extraordinary rendition or irregular rendition is the government sponsored abducting and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another. In the United States President Clinton authorized extraordinary rendition to nations known to practice torture, called torture by proxy.

Under the subsequent administration of President George W. Bush, the term became associated with transferring so-called "illegal combatants" (often never charged with any crime) both to other countries for torture by proxy, and to US controlled sites for a torture program called enhanced interrogation.[3][4][5][6] Extraordinary rendition continued with reduced frequency in the Obama administration: those abducted have been interrogated and subsequently taken to the US for trial.[7][

When posters seems to be saying almost anything at all to support a seemingly indefensible position, and ignoring info in the posts to which they are supposedly responding, I sometimes get curious. Hence the question at the end of my Reply 24, which the poster has not answered yet. So, when I saw your post, telling him what he already read in my Reply 24, if not sooner, I decided to glance at Albertoo's journal before beginning this reply to you.

Not much in yet, though. Just a very heavily photoshopped photo of Hillary as part of a video of Hillary's campaign song, and a post opposing police brutality. No clues that would suggest why it seems so important to Albertoo to justify extraordinary rendition, engaged in by our three most recent Presidents and supposedly begun by Bubba Clinton, as my Reply 18 had stated.

Guess the poster's zeal to distinguish extraordinary rendition, such as torture in our base in Bagram from torture in GITMO, aka our base in Cuba, will just have to remain a puzzle until we see more posts from him.

Or tortured them ourself on our own naval ships or our military bases, like Bagram. (Our naval ships and our military bases are not foreign soil, or McCain would not have been eligible to run for US President, nor would anyone born on a military base.)

I suppose you can grant me there is a difference between the wo processes.

Yup. Geography is the difference. That and, as I said in my prior post, extraordinary rendition may well be be even less moral than owning our torture. Torture anyway is ineffective and illegal. And being tortured because of the US in Syria or on a US naval ship hardly affects whether the detainee becomes a hero or not, or whether anyone sees us as villains or not. Why on earth would it? Did we save face by torturing Abu Ghraib prisoners--and we didn't even arrest some of those people. Seems as though you are straining to find some reason to distinguish ER that just doesn't exist in the real world.

Why are you are trying so hard to make extraordinary rendition to Syria or torture by us on a naval ship or a base like Bagram seem better than torture at ring in Gitmo (our base in Cuba is no more or less US soil than is our base in Bagram). Do you have a moral reason for that?

I understand what you both wrote, and I did acknowledge my position was not unassailable.

I restate torture is totally wrong, inefficient, ineffective.

While rendition seems to me to have some redeeming qualities, even if I do agree the rendition could be at the condition the prisoner isn't tortured.

But my problem is that a foreign bad guy in US hands not rendered stays to live on a life of relative comfort. When merrily writes "Besides, the US found ways not to give alleged terrorists the benefit of US law.", it seems to me it comes down to saying if a foreign fanatic is captured by US soldiers rather than non-western allied troops, the foreign fanatic has won the lottery: he will be treated far better than if he had been captured by the non-western allied troops.

Also, you overlook that many "foreign fanatics" who were tortured were innocent.

Relative comfort? Did you read the report? Did you follow the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning?

I clarified what I had said earlier by saying that, yes, a rendition should be made at the condition there will be no torture.

Now, what are your points you feel I did not address?

• That some of the suspects might be innocent? In what would that be a reason procluding the US from sending suspects to their country of origin? Because the alternative is to keep all suspects in the name of the few who are innocent? That's giving a unilateral guarantee that, once you're a prioner of the US, you are entitled to the full protection a US citizen would enjoy, no matter who you are and no matter where you have been caught.

• detention of Manning. Just checked. he was in maximum isolation. Pretty tough, but the UN rapporteur probably stretched the point when calling that torture.

And Sam Harris is an asshole, but that's neither here nor there.

Sam Harris presents his case in a reasonably presented, rather non confrontational way (except recently vs Ben Affleck)

And if you think the US using torture isn't a mistake, ask yourself why the ISIS butchers dressed their hostages in orange jumpsuit before slitting their throats.

nt

while I understand the logic of this argument, it is revolting on several levels not the least of which is that some of those who actually acted on these policies, prison guards at Abu Ghraib, went to PRISON for up to ten years, and even those who merely leaked information about torture and other war crimes have ended up in prison.

Pardon me for breaking Godwin's Law, but this is like letting the top Nazis off the hook and only trying the SS privates and sergeants for war crimes.

No one would consider that justice.

“If I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in cover-ups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our constitution is nobody above the law,” Barack Obama 2008 Primary campaign

One day, my son will grow up and join the army and I hope he can protect the country too by using a mop handle and a Kanye West album. Besides, we don't know if those techniques are still in use to this day... they're not technically illegal. Torture is... Enhanced Interogation now that's another thing entirely.