In my plea to filibuster Alberto Gonzales, which can be found in the Kos Petition one post below (Weakening the Constitution), I mentioned that keeping "torture" on the front page of the national conversation would bring out the legalese creeps, and their case needs to be heard.
Well, Marty Lederman has pre-empted them, with a detailed response to Heather Mac Donald.
The techniques that they have approved, or encouraged, or simply tolerated, would be more than disturbing enough even if the problem had gone no further. And once one understands what the Pentagon, and the CIA did in fact approve, and what they repeatedly characterized as lawful and humane such as waterboarding, forced nudity and sexual humiliation, it's not hard to imagine how atrocities such as those at Abu Ghraib could also have occurred. Indeed, it is difficult to resist Phillip Carter's conclusion that "[t]he devastating scandal of Abu Ghraib wasn't a failure of implementation, as Rice and other administration defenders have admitted. It was a direct and predictable consequence of a policy, hatched at the highest levels of the administration, by senior White House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months after 9/11." For further extensive eloquent treatment of this theme, see Andrew Sullivan's landmark essay in today's New York Times Book Review.
Marty's written a substantial 10 point response to Mac Donald's "anecdotal justification" of torture. I doubt Mac Donald deserved such thorough rebuke, in that the scathing knee-jerk kind I practice is sufficient for her, but the entire essay is an excellent approach to the legalese creeps who twist morality and justice in order to approve immorality and injustice. If you like a good legal argument, read the whole thing.
--Zap
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