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: Never In Our Names

Monday Open Thread and News

By Alexa

Do you feel it yet? The end of the Reagan Era is almost at hand. There is an almost palpable excitement and sense of joy, with no small degree of relief all about us. But don't rest just yet. Don't be complacent. We need to do whatever we can over the next 30 hours to GOTV. If you live in California or have friends or family in California, please talk to them about voting against Proposition 8. What kind of sense does it make to outlaw marriage, anyone's marriage, with a hate law?

Bybee Torture Memo Slapped Down In Court.

This is the infamous 80 page memo that includes:

• "In wartime, it is for the President alone to decide what methods to use to prevail against the enemy."
• Definition of torture as ""equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

The Bybee Memo was largely the creation of John Yoo.

From the outset, critics of the memo viewed the legal thinking behind it as flawed. Then Navy general counsel Alberto Mora identified it as a "dangerous document" that "spots some of the legal trees, but misses the constitutional forest. Because it identifies no boundaries to action - more, it alleges there are none - it is virtually useless as guidance." What particularly troubled Mora and other critics of the memo was that, as a document from the Office of Legal Counsel, its opinions were binding as the Administration's interpretation of the law.

The memo was eventually rescinded after Mora and other critics raised objections directly to the Pentagon leadership that was developing detainee interrogation procedures.

Today, Federal Judge Cecilia Altonaga rejected the terms laid out in the memo, saying, "I will not give an instruction that relies upon that memorandum as its authority."

Rejected now by both court and bureaucracy, the Bybee Memo may have no effective existence. But its notoriety is certain to outlive this Administration. Indeed, critics believe it will be part of the Bush legacy.

Described as a humiliating epilogue to the Bush Administration's attempt to integrate what many critics describe as undeniable torture into U.S. military and intelligence policy, the Bybee memo, this critic believes, isn't just part of Bush's legacy. Along with the self-described "war president's" invasion and occupation of Iraq, Bush's torture policy is his legacy.

More good news: CIA officers could face torture trials in Britain.

In April 2002, Binyam Mohamed was arrested in Karachi, Pakistan after attempting to board a flight to London with a fake British passport.  American authorities informed British counterparts Mohamed was plotting to build and detonate a "dirty bomb".  Mohamed was held in Pakistan as British intelligence was dispatched to interview him there.

In the interview with the British intelligence Mohamed admitted being recruited by the Taliban to Afghanistan to learn about explosives and weapons and confessed he was to travel to Britain (where Mohamed had been residing) to produce false passports.  Mohamed said the dirty bomb story was "an FBI perception".  The British spy concluded Mohamed was lying and brought American agents into the interrogations.

Lawyers representing Mr. Mohamed have sued, on Mohamed's behalf, British intelligence forces for their part in his detention and purported torture.  British judges overseeing the case and having received secret evidence, have become increasingly critical of U.S. conduct and are now considering charging American forces for their culpability in Mr. Mohamed's abuse.

Finally, in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan writes:

Cheney and Bush, unlike any presidency in American history, have dangerously pushed constitutional government to the brink of collapse. They did not merely assert a unified executive in which actions and regulations reserved to the executive branch were kept free from Congressional and judicial tampering. That is a perfectly defensible position, especially in wartime. They did not merely act in the immediate  wake of an emergency to protect American citizens swiftly - again a perfectly legitimate use of executive power, unhampered by Congress or courts.

They declared such power to be unlimited; they asserted also that it was as permanent as the emergency they declared; they claimed their dictatorial powers were inherent in the presidency itself, and above any legal constraints; they ordered their own lawyers to provide retroactive and laughable legal immunity for their crimes; they by-passed all the usual and necessary checks within the executive branch to ensure prudence and legality and self-doubt in the conduct of a war; they asserted that emergency war powers applied to the territory of the United States itself; they claimed the right to seize anyone - anyone, citizen or not - they deemed an "enemy combatant," to hold them indefinitely with no due process and to torture them until they became incoherent, broken, brutalized shells of human beings, if they survived at all.

They did this to the guilty and they did this to the innocent. But they also had no way of reliably knowing which was which and who was who. Never before in wartime has the precious, sacred inheritance of free people been treated with such contempt by the leaders of the democratic West.

Never before, and never again, I hope. In rereading the histories of the Pilgrims who set sail from England to escape their despotic King, nothing else has reminded me so well and so often of our tyrant.

They seized countless individuals with no trials and no hearings. They tortured dozens to death. They subjected many more to some of the worst psychological torture techniques devised by Communist totalitarians and the worst physical suffering devised by the Gestapo. They crossed lines no American president had ever crossed before. They withdrew the US from the Geneva Conventions - and did so  secretly. They tapped American's phones without warrants, and forced many of their randomly grabbed prisoners into the black hole of insanity. They set up secret sites in former Soviet gulags to torture their victims.

They single-handedly devastated America's reputation for human rights and the rule of law in the minds of the vast majority of people in other Western democracies, let alone the developing world, let alone the millions of Muslims across the Middle East who now suspect that America is not really better than their own thugocracies, that America also tortures when it wants to, that the shining city on a hill is actually a place where men above the law can do anything they want to other human beings in their custody.

Sullivan writes an endorsement of Barack Obama, well worth your time to read in its entirety, closing with these words:

The world will soon remember why it resents America as well as loves it. But until this unlikely fellow with the funny ears and strange name and exotic biography emerged on the scene, I had begun to wonder if it was possible at all. I had almost given up hope, and he helped restore it.

That is what is stirring out there; and although you are welcome to mock me for it, I remain unashamed. As someone once said, in the unlikely story of America, there is never anything false about hope.

I can't add to this. All I can do is smile through happy tears, because I, too, have known the renewal of hope in these darkest of days. Please help. We'll never have a better chance or another chance like this one. We've never needed change more.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on November 03, 2008 (boomark / email).