Ruth Marcus Supports Torture

"It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners."
— Albert Camus

Washington Post editorial writer Ruth Marcus has joined the side of the executioners and provided a clear example of how that is respectably done in our time and place.

Her recent column begins:

"Should Bush administration officials be put on trial for crimes such as authorizing torture?"

Assuming that we intend to live in what John Adams called a nation of laws, not men, this ought to be an easy one. Is there probable cause to believe that Bush administration officials (notably including one George W. Bush) authorized torture? Of course. The executive orders are publicly available, and Bush has openly admitted to what most informed observers call authorizing torture. This has been known for years, but the Senate Armed Services Committee recently admitted the point in a detailed report that caught the attention of the Washington Post and even Ruth Marcus. That report begins with this summary:

"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."

The report goes on to detail steps taken, beginning with Bush's February 7, 2002, order illegally and laughably, if tragically, declaring that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to certain people. The report also details the president's efforts to "redefine the law" by requesting "legal opinions" that illegal acts would now be legal.

Ruth Marcus's column continues:

"Personally, I'm just relieved to have this crowd heading out of office and its policies -- on torture, on indefinite detention, on warrantless wiretapping, on overweening executive power -- soon to be inoperative."

This is both a blatant and a subtle statement. It's blatantly violative of the idea of a rule of law. Imagine telling a state trooper who pulls you over for speeding that he should just be relieved to watch you drive away (and where he can stick his ticket). It's subtly manipulative in that prior to this administration no president had any "policies on torture". Torture was and is simply illegal. It is illegal in all forms and in all times and places, no matter what. The idea that there can be better and worse "policies on" this is destructive of the very notion of legality. And, yes, that legality includes laws against murder. Numerous victims of torture under Bush have been tortured to death. A CIA employee has been sentenced to 8 years in prison for interrogating a detainee by beating him to death. And, of course, it's also insidious to suggest that what we need is a different variety of policy on indefinite detention or warrantless spying, both actions involving stark violations of law openly admitted to.

Marcus continues:

"But the imminent arrival of the Obama administration has sparked a renewed clamor for criminal investigation and prosecution in some quarters on the left. Vice President Cheney stoked the flames with an ABC interview in which he was typically unrepentant about the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and particularly explicit about his own involvement."

While many of us have been demanding impeachment and prosecution for years, some voices are now focused on prosecution because they've given up on getting impeachment. Others are newly focused on prosecution because they are raising alarms about the danger of Bush pardoning crimes he authorized. Obama's arrival is marginally relevant to the movement for accountability, which is seeking prosecution at the district, state, civil, foreign, and international levels, as well as federal. But framing this as Obama versus Bush allows Marcus to suggest a partisan spat, a framing that leads ultimately, in many people's minds (including Alan Dershowitz's), to the conclusion that Bush must not be prosecuted because he is a member of a political party. Cheney "stoked the flames"? Imagine if your neighbor killed his wife and then went on TV and bragged about it. Would the local columnists denounce that as fanning the flames of hysteria, as encouraging the radicals who were demanding prosecution of your neighbor? Of course not. So, what's wrong with our national columnists?

Marcus continues, and brings up the report I mentioned above, but lists it as one more element fanning the flames:

"Meanwhile, the Senate Armed Services Committee released a report concluding that Donald Rumsfeld's decision as defense secretary to authorize 'aggressive interrogation techniques' was 'a direct cause of detainee abuse' at Guantanamo Bay.

"New York Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler wrote to Attorney General Michael Mukasey demanding a special prosecutor. (Good luck with that.) The New York Times called the Senate report 'a strong case for bringing criminal charges' against Rumsfeld and Pentagon legal counsel William Haynes, and maybe even Alberto Gonzales and Cheney aide David Addington."

Those wild and crazy flame fanners! "Good luck with that!" Marcus is now publicly mocking a member of Congress for proposing that laws be enforced, and revealing her awareness of what she next goes on to explicitly state: Obama wants no part of it.

"Not that President-elect Obama seems particularly eager to take that plunge.

"'If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,' Obama said in April. Still, he said, 'I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we've got too many problems we've got to solve.'"

As it happens, the top (most voted for) question people are asking Obama right now on his website is whether he will appoint a special prosecutor to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping. Voting is still open for those who want to register their opinions.

Marcus makes clear which side she comes down on:

"I touched briefly on this subject the other day, writing that 'ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated . . . may be more important than punishing those who acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right.'

"How, some readers asked, could future law-breaking be prevented if past misdeeds go unpunished?"

Marcus provides six nonsensical answers. Are you ready?

"First, criminal prosecution isn't the only or necessarily the most effective mechanism for deterrence. To the extent that they weigh the potential penalties for their actions, government officials worry as much about dealing with career-ruining internal investigations or being hauled before congressional committees. Criminal prosecution and conviction requires such a high level of proof of conscious wrongdoing that the likelihood of those other punishments is much greater."

The two main problems with this are as follows. First, "internal" investigations of the president and his top officials are not done by the executive branch, and attempts at oversight by Congress have been blocked by Congress's refusal to impeach combined with the president's dictatorial decision to ignore subpoenas. Second, any such steps are now in the past. It's too late for "internal investigations" to ruin the careers of Bush's torture lawyers who are now off lecturing at top universities and running our courts.

"Second, the looming threat of criminal sanctions did not do much to deter the actions of Bush administration officials. 'The Terror Presidency,' former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith's account of the legal battles within the administration over torture and wiretapping, is replete with accounts of how officials proceeded despite their omnipresent concerns about legal jeopardy.

'In my two years in the government, I witnessed top officials and bureaucrats in the White House and throughout the administration openly worrying that investigators acting with the benefit of hindsight in a different political environment would impose criminal penalties on heat-of-battle judgment calls,' Goldsmith writes."

Bear this in mind when Marcus writes below in this very same column that she does not think there has been any "conscious law breaking." But let's also stop and think here for a minute. If none of Marcus's other preferred methods ("internal investigations," "congressional committees") deterred these criminals, and the possibility of prosecution didn't deter them, and Marcus hasn't dreamed up any NEW methods of deterring future criminals, are we more likely to deter future crimes by prosecuting these or by letting them go unpunished? If the president before Bush had gone to prison for similar crimes, would the threat of prosecution have served as a greater or lesser deterrent than it actually did? The answer seems obvious to mere mortals not privileged to editorialize in the Washington Post.

"Third, punishment is not the only way to prevent wrongdoing. If someone is caught breaking into your house, by all means, press charges. But you might also want to consider installing an alarm system or buying stronger locks. Responsible congressional oversight, an essential tool for checking executive branch excesses, was lacking for much of the Bush administration.

We installed impeachment in our Constitution, Congress refused to use it, and the Washington Post ignored and mocked a massive public demand for it. We installed the power of contempt and the right to imprison recalcitrant witnesses in our legislature, Congress refused to use it, the Washington Post admitted it existed but never editorialized for it, and the Bush-Cheney gang ignored subpoenas. These failures hardly justify intentionally failing in an additional arena.

"Fourth, there is a cost to pursuing criminal charges. As appalling as waterboarding is, for example, it was pursued with the analysis and approval of lawyers who concluded, however wrongly, that it did not rise to the level of torture. If government officials cannot safely rely on legal advice, they will err on the side of excessive timidity."

So, there you have it. If you hire lawyers who will obey orders to declare illegal activities legal, and you then claim to have acted on the advice of your lawyers, despite the very well-known fact that torture is always illegal, then what you have done is the equivalent of bad home decoration, which is the sort of offense for which the Washington Post most often reserves the term "appalling." (And we reduce a wide range of brutal torture techniques to the water torture and rename it waterboarding.) But to call something a crime after a lawyer has backed it? Well, that could lead to such catastrophes as failing to torture people. Since when is "timidity" about law breaking a bad thing? Can these columnists hear themselves?

Fifth, focusing governmental energy on uncovering and punishing the actions of the past will inevitably drain energy and political capital from the new administration. It would be a better use of the administration's time to figure out how to close Guantanamo and deal with the remaining prisoners.

So we've gone from framing this as an Obama problem to assuming that everyone places increasing Obama's "political capital" higher in their list of priorities than deterring future presidents from committing murder. And we've rejected punishing "actions of the past," oblivious apparently to the fact that all law enforcement is punishment of actions of the past, that we actually do not ever punish actions of the future. And then there is the more deeply hidden assumption that prosecuting the most widely despised administration of the past would not make Obama extremely popular around this country and around the world in the future. If that assumption were convincing, I'd still demand justice, but I don't think we should allow it to simply be assumed.

Here's Marcus's sixth excuse:

"I am not arguing against any criminal prosecution of any Bush administration official no matter what the facts -- I'm just saying that the bar is awfully high. Lying to investigators and covering up questionable activities should be prosecuted because such conduct frustrates the capacity of other government checks to function."

The bar for prosecution is higher for some people than for others? And it is higher for those who can do the most damage? And it remains higher even after they are out of office and returned to the status of mere plutocrats -- oops, I mean, citizens? This is to invert the common sentiment of the founders of this nation who believed that holding the president to the rule of law was more important because of his power, not less important. This stunning assertion by Marcus almost knocks one too dizzy to notice what she slips in during the same breath. She favors prosecution for lying to investigators and covering up questionable activities. The questionable activities themselves should be left unpunished (except by investigation), but the coverup should be prosecuted. Well, what are we waiting for? This requires a new headline and lead paragraph for this column. Doesn't the Post have editors? Doesn't the FBI say that Cheney has lied about torture and the Plame leak. Wasn't the whole Plame leak part of a massive coverup for lying us into an illegal war with a major assist from the Washington Post? Is there any doubt that the Bush-Cheney gang would lie and obstruct any prosecutor's investigation of any of their crimes? But there's Ruth Marcus's Catch 22: it's hard to prosecute the lies to investigators if you don't allow any investigations.

Marcus has one more point to make:

"And prosecution would be justified if there is evidence, as Obama put it, of 'genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies . . . that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws.' Really bad policies? No question about that. Conscious law-breaking? I'm doubtful -- and skeptical, too, that the symbolic benefit of any such prosecution would outweigh the inevitable costs.

So now there is no deterrent value at all, but only symbolism. (Remember that when the state trooper pulls you over!) And the evidence is all gone too. Never mind the bodies. Never mind the torture victims, the photographs, the videos, the confessions. Never mind that Bush declared the illegal legal, tortured, signed into law new bills redundantly recriminalizing torture after lobbying against those measures, added signing statements declaring the right to torture in violation of the new laws as well, and went right on torturing. The important thing to remember is that he was not deterred by any threat of punishment. And therefore we should not punish him. We should refrain, if only to send the proper message to future presidents, and the proper message to potential terrorists.

Thank you.

Or someone else will try us. And they might not observe the niceties of a trial with rules of evidence and procedure, and all that nice stuff. In fact, they might just decide to, I dunno, take some extra-legal measures against our entire population for its complicity in these crimes against humanity.

But by all means, Ruth Marcus; if it makes you squeamish to think of high governmental officials being held responsible for their high crimes and misdemeanors, I hope you won't feel too badly when revenge is exacted. And I sure hope the offices of the Post aren't a target.

again as torture apologists and torturer excusers on the right swamp the sunday talkfests in the name of "bipartisan good feeling".

Every broken law we ignore now will come back to haunt us in harsher form in the future. The next Repug ascendancy will move us even closer to enslavement.

then it's a precedent for similar policy decisions from a future administration.

in short, democratic presidents are subject to infinite investigation and must be saints to avoid impeachment, while even the slightest hint that a republican president might be doing something improper is regarded as treason.

if we prosecute, these attitudes go away with the shurb administration.
if we don't prosecute, these attitudes come back with the next -- and every -- republican administration.

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if we shrank the crime to a piddly little local one like the murder of one person in your neighborhood, and a local pundit argued for the policy of letting such crimes go so that we could better move forward, and I said the pundit was supporting murder, I'd be less likely to be called a liar than to be accused of being a sissy for not demanding that the pundit be hung

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i am saying that she is supporting torture

i've said it at some length so i'm not going to say it again

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Of course she "says" she doesn't but she goes on to say that Bush shouldn't be punished. Makes me wonder if she supports torture or not. Words are cheap. How better to try to persuade than by her claiming to oppose torture but then going on to say we shouldn't prosecute torturers.

she says she does not support torture. The OP explicitly claims she does- with ZERO evidence. It's incumbent on the OP to provide some evidence of his claim. Furthermore, like it or not, there are a lot of people out there who condemn torture, but for various reasons don't support criminal procedures against bush.

I really dislike seeing this kind of dishonesty.

As Ms. Marcus says, is that really that much different from supporting torture?

Isn't looking the other way about it almost the same thing?

but she argues that there shouldn't be criminal prosecutions for breaking the law. You don't have to say you support torture to allow it to happen, and if you don't take measures to make sure it doesn't happen again e.g. prosecutions, then as far as I am concerned and I am sure in the minds of many others you are complicit in allowing it to happen which is the same as supporting it. I really dislike seeing such short sightedness.

edited for sentence structure

If you support torturers then you support torture, all claims to the contrary excepted.

Who is really being dishonest here?

it's easy to say

Calling what the Bush administration did bad policy on torture suggests that there could be a good policy. That is conditional support for torture.

When someone committed a murder, would we say that is was merely their murder "policy" that was bad and excuse failure to prosecute them for the crime on that basis? If someone advocated that, they would be supporting murder.

Its one thing to disagree with someone, but I suspect that you don't disagree with everything Ruth Marcus writes and if disagreeing with someone some of the time makes that person a jackass, then the world is populated almost entirely with jackasses.

Disclaimer -- About 25 years ago or so, Ruth worked for a summer at the same law firm as I did. While I haven't stayed in touch with her, I do occasionally see her husband and they are both very nice people.

You stated: "About 25 years ago or so, Ruth worked for a summer at the same law firm as I did. While I haven't stayed in touch with her, I do occasionally see her husband and they are both very nice people." I'm sure this is true, but it doesn't change the fact that by advocating that we do nothing, this "nice" person is allowing evil to triumph.

Being a nice or good person, even a lawful person, doesn't mean that said person can't also "support" evil by permitting it to happen or, in this instance, by advocating that it should go unpunished and in no way deterred. Is she a jackass? Perhaps not. But she does sound pretty lazy. It's too hard to punish the criminals, so let's forget about it and move on? Pretend it never happened? If we can prosecute Nazis who ran camps to this day, and KKK members who lynched innocent people back in Jim Crow times, if there are lawyers willing to fight to do that, rather than advise their clients that "It's too hard" and "let it go," then this woman's inability to advise the same in this instance is inexcusable.

Those who work for the law but don't want to fight for what's right, no matter how hard or how much of a long-shot it is, should go into a different profession.

and i agree. there are so many reasons they must be prosecuted, and not one good reason not to prosecute. laziness is the poorest excuse of all.

You say that Ruth is a very nice person and I have no reason to doubt you. But, in this world, very nice people can rationalize just about anything. Many say that George and Laura are very nice people. While Hitler and Stalin killed millions out of outright wickedness, George killed over a million out of a arrogant, narcissistic ignorance. And I am sure that Laura rationalizes the Iraq deaths away as easily as anything.

The media in this country is much more than innocent bystanders merely reporting the news. In many cases they have fabricated the news and steered public opinion so as to create an atmosphere where immoral policies could take place. Yes, she supports torture.

is selling the notion of a "good faith torture program." Of course this is idiotic.

Good faith motives are taken for granted. Even Bush critics like Suskind and Mayer have suggested that torture was an overreaction by panicked officials who were desperate to prevent follow up attacks.

1. The officials who sold the public on torture have never accounted for their bizarre pre-9/11 conduct. The White House ignored all sorts of warnings. The CIA withheld the alHazmi/alMihdhar intel for around 20 months (the withholding continued even after the Cole attack). Hayden (another torture supporter) failed to use FISA to track known al Qaeda operatives inside the US. One need not be a "conspiracy nut" to question the credibility of these officials and wonder why they failed to follow standard procedure before 9/11 yet after 9/11 claimed that police state tactics were absolutely required to prevent terrorist attacks.

2. Experienced FBI interrogators were replaced with a reverse engineered SERE bullshit program. For example, FBI agent Ali Soufan spoke Arabic, was a rising star in the FBI CT division and had experience interrogating al Qaeda operatives (for example in Yemen during the Cole investigation).

Here is his replacement:



3. The torture didn't work!



Government officials disgraced the country, endangered military personnel and increased hostility against the US. And they did so for no good reason. Their conduct was outrageous and inexcusable. Why shouldn't citizens want these crimes prosecuted regardless of the consequences?

He's been http://www.talkingimpeachment.com/blog/Hall-of-Shame-Inductee----Barak-Obama.html">applying it for years now.

You might consider his war criminality to be a "lesser" type than bushcheney (actually, it's far worse), but the reality of it cannot be denied. It will undercut anything he attempts to do.

Impeachment remains our ONLY moral, patriotic option.

---

"It's just a god-damned piece of paper." . . .
George W. Bush, referring to the Constitution of the United States of America -- the foundation of ALL of our laws . . .

to prevent future torture is to strengthen the criminal laws against torture. The laws we have that criminalize torture by military personnel are pretty good, but the ones that apply to civilian members of the govt suck! Marcus is right to doubt that bush et al. could be successfully prosecuted for torture. The Torture Act and the War Crimes Act (after being gutted by the Military Commissions Act) quite arguably fail to criminalize waterboarding. We need laws that are much more explicit in criminalizing all forms of torture.

And by the way, avoid distortion: it is at the very least misleading to say that Marcus supports torture.

has neither the spine nor the political will to address the Cartel's crimes, it's the role of international law enforcement to kidnap the war criminals, and put them in the dock at The Hague to be tried for crimes against humanity as prescribed by the Nuremberg Accords.
Just because they were allowed to steal two elections and shred our Constitution does not mean they can go without retribution for violating internationally recognized standards of criminal behavior.
If the Democratic leadership continues to throw up its hands and claims there's nothing that can be done, then they too should go on trial as enablers to crimes committed by the Cartel.
This country needs a collective shower after the past eight years of moral turpitude.
If only there was a stained blue dress...................

I'm sure there is a blow job in there somewhere.

might change her mind.

torture changes no one's mind for the better, and certainly not the torturer's

I forgot to include:sarcasm:

It's a big can of worms, and some of the worms that went along with Bush/Cheney were "our" guys.

Can't say the same for yours.

Saying she supports torture is a highly irrational and borderline insane twist on what she actually did write. This OP is laughable.

:D Keep it up and thanks for the support. :thumbsup:

Pravda on the Potomac strikes again! The time has come to boycott this worthless right wing propaganda rag once and for all. Boycott anyone who advertises in the flagship of the Corporate Controlled Conservative Press!

Governor Blago.

Attacking Ruth Marcus is fine with me, except it overlooks the fact that she is just one weasel inside an entire pack of weasels. And her organization is headed by weasels. Who told us the War in Iraq II was a good idea? Her newspaper. Who told us that housing prices could only go up and never down? Her newspaper. Who ignored the fact that AT& T co-operating with this Administration's spying on us?

Her newspaper. Etc.

Thank you for the excellent post. I tried to recommend it but evidently you can only recommend within the first 24 hours of the post.

In addition to trying to set this up as a Bush vs. Obama issue, Ms. Marcus also trots out the use of the term "the left" in order to try to minimize this issue. She is hoping like a lot of beltay media types hope that if one uses the term "the left" those who do not identify as being liberal will automatically take the opposite position. Ms. Marcus should know full well that it isn't only the left that wants Bush war criminals held accountable. Even the right leaning John Birch Society has skewered Ms. Marcus and her "let bygones be bygones thinking". Check it out.

Mainstream Media’s Moral Meltdown

snip>


The Post’s Ruth Marcus added another coat of whitewash on December 20. In case that didn’t cover enough of the Administration’s sins, she applied more on the 31st. It’s not the quantity of criminals nor deterring them that bothers her; no, it’s censuring officials with such noble motives.

Should we condemn men who tortured out of “high principle”? (That gets my vote for “Oxymoron of the Year.”) Isn’t “ensuring that these mistakes are not repeated … more important than punishing those who acted wrongly in pursuit of what they thought was right”? Pity the poor politicians who must now “worry… about dealing with career-ruining internal investigations or being hauled before congressional committees.” Far better for the nation to “turn the page to a new era.” Kids who smoke a joint at a party should be so lucky. Unless, of course, one day they plan to occupy the White House as an elected official.

http://www.jbs.org/index.php/jbs-news-feed/4311