How’s this for speaking out? This is from the current issue of America Magazine the Jesuit weekly. Oh I forgot- Catholics aren’t Christians and certainly not Jesuits. :sarcasm:
Legal Obligations- The Proper Role of White House Lawyers by William Treanor (Dean of Fordham University School of Law)
Underlying the torture memo and other memoranda was a stunningly broad theory of executive power. “In wartime,” the memo states, “it is for the President alone to decide what methods to use to best prevail against the enemy.” The memo reflects an approach under which the president even has the power to disregard statutes governing the military or the conduct of war.
This conception of presidential power is at odds with the Constitution. While the drafters of the Constitution made the president the commander in chief of the armed forces, they also gave Congress great powers in military and foreign affairs, including the power to declare war. This constitutional framework is one of shared authority, and governing judicial precedent reflects that understanding. The torture memo ignored all this as its authors single-mindedly pressed an expansive view of presidential power.
What made the torture memo and similar memos authorizing war-related actions by agents of the executive branch even more of a threat to the constitutional order and the rule of law is that they were secret. Congress had no way of knowing that the executive branch was disregarding U.S. law. There are three crucial steps needed to protect the rule of law.
http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11796Truth and Consequences – The Case for a Commission on Torture by David Cole (Professor at Georgetown Law School – Author of “The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable” release date Sept, 2009)
We know already that U.S. officials up to and including Vice President Dick Cheney authorized waterboarding. We also know that lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, including Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Daniel Levin and Stephen Bradbury, wrote memoranda that gave a green light to pthe practice by arguing that waterboarding does not constitute torture, of even cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and C.I.A. Director Leon Panetta have all since conceded what the world already knew – that waterboarding is in fact torture.
As a leagl matter, the United States is compelled by the U.N. Convention Against Torture, a binding treaty that we ratified in 1988, to “submit the case to competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.”
http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11797No Excuses – Our Obligation to Prosecute Human Rights Violations by Mary Ellen O’Connell (Robert and Marion Short Chair in Law and Research Professor of International Disput Resolutin – Kroc Institute, University of Notre Dame, author of “The Power and Purpose of International Law”)
Our nation is a party to these and other treaties prohibiting torture and mandating investigation and prosecution.
We know that high officials in the Bush administration violated these treaties. We have unimpeachable documents confirming that individuals taken into custiody since Sept. 11, 2001, were waterboarded and worse. The controversy over whether waterboarding is torture is entirely specious. In fact, the United States has prosecuted Japanese military personnel at the end of World War II, American soldiers during the Philippine Insurrection, (1902-13) and others for waterboarding.
Investigating and prosecuting such crimes is obligatory; it is not a “witch hunt,” as some charge. Nor is it something optional- a matter of “prosecutorial discretion”—that the president may choose to forgo.
http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11798Torture and the Rule of Law
The Editors | AUGUST 3, 2009
Torture, detention without trial, secret surveillance of citizens, power to strip citizens’ rights on suspicion of terrorism—the list of alleged misdeeds by the Bush administration in its so-called war on terror is highly troubling, reminiscent of the abuses for which the American colonies declared independence from Britain. For months debate has stirred on how the nation should address these violations of civil liberties and discipline the officials responsible for them. America has asked three distinguished lawyers to make the case for one of three alternatives: taking preventive action, convoking a blue-ribbon committee of inquiry or bringing criminal charges.
http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11795The editors inviet comments – use this link:
http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11795&comments
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