Constitutional Law

Do Nomination Controversies Turn on Torture?

Emerging reports are relating the delayed nominations of Dawn Johnsen and Harold Koh for toplegal posts in the Obama administration to their vocal criticism of torture allegedly performed under the Bush administration.

Scott Horton, human rights attorney and lecturer at Columbia Law School, writes:

Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administrations nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to ‘go nuclear' over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public.

This report leaves Yale Law Prof. Jack Balkin asking why some senators are 'so deeply threatened by the additional confirmation that the United States engaged in torture.'

The real resistance, it appears, is to the public disclosure of an official government document approving specific techniques that amount to torture. This degree of specificity and the government's request for approval of specific techniques does not appear in the original torture memos already released to the public.

…

[I]f such documents ever came to light, pressure for public investigations – including truth commissions – and even the appointment of a non-partisan special prosecutor to investigate possible criminal prosecutions would become inevitable.

Full post as published by ACS Blog on April 06, 2009 (boomark / email).