Well 'splained, DD. Thanks.

Did you by chance have to take on prosecutorial misconduct in your law career?

"And I think rummy and cheney and w should be prosecuted for perpetrating a lie that led to abuse, torture and unjust prosecutions"

Couldn't agree more, my friend. I heard last night on Kieth that the CIA doctors refused to go along with the torture so they hired outside hacks. Someone told them to do that, and someone told them. ..

Rule of Law Anyone??

Why would we prosecute these enlistees and not prosecute the CIA operatives? It makes me very angry at Obama.

Great post DD,it brought out some good threads. You gave me some new thoughts and so far I agree with everything said. Thanks

Absolutely. There is a huge double standard at play. The bottom line is that there are a dozen or so individuals that ought to be in jail ASAP.

I won't name names. You hit on several in your article and there's overwhelming documentary and prima facie evidence of SO MANY CRIMES that even focusing on the torture is only getting at a small bit of it.

The soldiers were made scapegoats, but the soldiers did engage in the illegal activities that THEY WERE ORDERED to do by Bush, etc.

I'd certainly say to free them immediately if we're not even going to try and prosecute the REAL culprits.

Enjoy.

Jeremy Scahill is following this subject closely too and adds another facet to the discussion. Apparently the Iraqis are still torturing their prisoners and the US doesn’t have the credibility to stop them.

A new UN human rights report examining Iraq shows that torture of prisoners by Iraqi authorities is widespread and accountability is nonexistent. “The lack of accountability of the perpetrators of such human rights abuses reinforces the culture of impunity,” the UN bluntly states. The 30-page report by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, which examined conditions in Iraq from July to December 2008, was just released Wednesday.

http://uniraq.org/newsroom/getarticle.asp?ArticleID=1016

It is well known that after Bush launched the so-called “War on Terror,” the US torture system was exported from Guantanamo to Afghanistan and Iraq. Apparently the disdain for accountability and international law was as well when the US was setting up the new Iraqi government. Wasn’t Saddams torture and disdain for international law one of the justifications for the invasion (after the WMD myth was exposed)? This UN report should serve as a sobering reminder of why it is so important to hold those who created, ordered, justified and implemented the US torture program responsible for their crimes. Sadly, the US at present has zero credibility in confronting these crimes by the Iraqi authorities. – Jeremy Scahill

http://rebelreports.com/post/101946080/new-un-report-shows-the-us-combo-of-torture-and

This article here is a must-read, dd:

http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/21/the_olc_torture_memos_thoughts_from_a_dissenter

For example:

3. The legal opinions have grave weaknesses.

Weakest of all is the May 30 opinion, just because it had to get over the lowest standard -- "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" in Article 16 of the Convention Against Torture. That standard was also being codified in the bill Senator John McCain was fighting to pass. It is also found in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, a standard that the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 does apply to these prisoners. Violation of Common Article 3 is a war crime under federal law (18 U.S.C. section 2441), a felony punishable by up to life imprisonment. (The OLC opinions do not discuss this law because in 2005 the administration also denied the applicability of Common Article 3.)

The OLC holds, rightly, that the United States complies with the international standard if it complies with the comparable body of constitutional prohibitions in U.S. law (the 5th, 8th, and 14th Amendments). Many years earlier, I had worked in that area of the law. I believed that the OLC opinions (especially the May 30 one) presented the U.S. government with a distorted rendering of relevant U.S. law.

At the time, in 2005, I circulated an opposing view of the legal reasoning. My bureaucratic position, as counselor to the secretary of state, didn't entitle me to offer a legal opinion. But I felt obliged to put an alternative view in front of my colleagues at other agencies, warning them that other lawyers (and judges) might find the OLC views unsustainable. My colleagues were entitled to ignore my views. They did more than that: The White House attempted to collect and destroy all copies of my memo. I expect that one or two are still at least in the State Department's archives.

Stated in a shorthand way, mainly for the benefit of other specialists who work these issues, my main concerns were:

* the case law on the "shocks the conscience" standard for interrogations would proscribe the CIA's methods;

* the OLC memo basically ignored standard 8th Amendment "conditions of confinement" analysis (long incorporated into the 5th amendment as a matter of substantive due process and thus applicable to detentions like these). That case law would regard the conditions of confinement in the CIA facilities as unlawful.

* the use of a balancing test to measure constitutional validity (national security gain vs. harm to individuals) is lawful for some techniques, but other kinds of cruel treatment should be barred categorically under U.S. law -- whatever the alleged gain.

The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.

In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest -- if the alleged national security justification was compelling. I did not believe our federal courts could reasonably be expected to agree with such a reading of the Constitution.