Posted on 09/26/2009 1:19:57 PM PDT by OldDeckHand
As we all know, in the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.
Last night's episode of television's longest running drama -- NBC's "Law & Order" -- featured District Attorney Jack McCoy prosecuting a John Yoo-esque Bush administration Justice Department attorney for writing a legal memo authorizing the torture of detainees.
"Jack, you want to prosecute a member of the Bush administration for assaulting suspected terrorists?" McCoy is asked in the season premiere episode, titled "Memo from the Dark Side."
"The word is 'torturing,'" says McCoy, played by Sam Waterston. "And yes -- it's about time somebody did."
The episode has been embraced by some of the most vocal advocates for prosecuting actual Bush administration officials for torture.
Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, wrote on the Huffington Post that "[w]hat McCoy understands is that in America, the rule of law applies to everyone. No one is above the law, not even (and some might say especially) the most powerful. ... In real life, there has yet to be an investigation into the high-level authorization of torture, a crime that has stained the reputation of our nation at home and abroad."
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.abcnews.com ...
It’s too bad many Freepers continue to watch L&O shows.
I watch L & O for the same reason I read Mad Magazine. The show continually gets sillier.
In real life, people of other countries call us pussies for actually saying the interrogations we did were "torture".
First you would have to have a legal definition of torture and then you would have to see if the memo descriptions allow them. THEN you would have to find whether it is illegal under federal law. Then you would have to ascertain whether a memo can be considered a criminal act... etc etc
blah blah blah
I bet they never get around to any of that
A friend of mine used to fish and hang with Sam in the mid to late 80’s. He said he was an OK guy then. Now he’s such a flaming lib my friend can’t stand to hear his voice.
Same old same old BS from the left. L&O has a history of hiding Islamic terrorism, left wing terrorism and torture by terrorists - boo hoo, someone was hung up, well at least they didn’t have their heads sawn off for video! As always, the left projects their crimes on everyone fighting to preserve our civilization while making victims of terrorists. And again, there’s the same old BS about getting better information by “respecting” your enemies. Torture is only ineffective when getting confessions, not information as information can be verified.
I find the mostly "liberal/progressive" social theme set ups in recent TV dramas, to be contrived ,oversimplified, and irritating. That, along with the soap-opera-like gratuitous sexual interplay has put me off of it. Most of it seems sophomoric and unlikely to happen.
You are quite correct.
However, there is a slippery slope argument here I’ve seldom seen addressed with the seriousness it deserves.
There were three basic groups involved in the whole “torture” issue:
1. Attorneys who gave their legal opinion on what interrogation methods are permitted under the law.
2. Policy makers who decided whether to implement those opinions.
3. Interrogators who followed the policies.
My concern is that the conservative position in general appears to be that none of these three groups can be held responsible for violation of law.
The attorneys didn’t break any laws, they just gave their opinion. (We’ll just ignore the rather glaring likelihood that their opinions were tailored to what their bosses wanted.)
The policy makers were just following advide of counsel, so they can’t be held accountable.
The interrogators can’t be prosecuted, they were just implementing policy.
My concern is that if this paradigm is allowed to stand, it would permit any administration to implement just about any policy it cares to, as long as it distributed responsibility for the policy in this way.
I’m not saying laws were broken in this whole “torture” issue, I’m saying that if they were broken somebody should be prosecuted for doing so. Failing to enforce the law sets a really bad precedent.
Certainly similar methods could be used against “right-wing domestic terrorists.”
Or George Soros to the Obama Administration.
Or Van Jones...
Or...
Maybe they’ll have one about the missing Birth Certificate and the Constitutional Crisis that it would cause if anyboidy cared. / SARC...
ROFL..you’re funny..
What you either don't know, or fail to recognize in your thesis, is that career prosecutors - not political appointees - looked at these accusations over three years ago, and found them to be without merit. It's part of the liberal political narrative to say that these events have not been investigated, when in fact, they were investigated with great enthusiasm and candor.
Holder himself now, is overruling long-held traditions (and policies) in reviewing these cases after there has been a determination in the prior administration not to prosecute. This is a precedent in the history of the DOJ, and one that I'm sure others will come to regret long after this particular issue has become irrelevant. While this is not a violation of the principle of Double Jeopardy in the strictest sense, I personally feel it violates at least the spirit of the 5th Amendment.
If we were to examine this from a historical perspective, what would have kept subsequent administrations from investigating and prosecuting Harry S Truman for war crimes at the end of WWII? After all, Truman intentionally targeted and destroyed an two entire citie causing incalculable death and destruction to the civilian populations of those cities. In Eric Holder's world view, nothing would have kept Eisenhower or Kennedy from launching an investigation to examine the legality of Truman's actions. In fact, using Holder's principles of justice, Truman would have been investigated, prosecuted and convicted of war crimes. Now, is that the behavior of a mature democracy, or is that the behavior of a banana republic? I would submit it's the later, and certainly not the former.
My concern was not with regard to this particular case, but rather with regard to the precedent it appears to be setting.
I thought I made that pretty clear, but you made no attempt to show why “fault” distributed as I claimed could not be used to shelter all parties. You only said it wasn’t properly applicable in this particular case.
In some future case where actual criminal acts are performed after legal opinions have been obtained from Justice Dept. attorneys, which of the three groups should be held legally responsible?
Law and Order jumped the shark last season.
The answer is for Congress to actually pass an easily understandable law on the subject. Not something they like to do because they like to be as vague and broad as possible.
Is that show still on??? I havent watched that tripe since Ben Bratt left.
Ripped from todays headlines really means” We ran out of ideas and now we read the paper”
exactly.
Agreed.
The simple answer is, none of them - assuming of course we're talking about events that took place in a prior administration. The framers were wise to put a mechanism in place to indict, convict and remove sitting presidents from office. This controversy was no "secret" to the 2006 session of congress. Nancy Pelosi could have held hearing, and if the facts and evidence supported it, she could have moved for the impeachment of President Bush. But she didn't, and the reason she didn't was precisely because the politics of that decision would have spelled disaster for the newly minted Democrat majority. You see, this is just as much a matter of politics as it is a matter of law.
The moment we head down this road of investigating administrations once they leave office, is the moment we place the country in a death spiral, from which there may not be a recovery.
When Clinton left office, many in the grass-roots conservative movement wanted all manner of investigation into the Clinton administration. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed, and we didn't see that transpire. Ford was another man that put country ahead of his own personal political viability. He pardoned Nixon, ending any chances of him being elected to the office he held but he saved the country from 24 months of turmoil, and he kept a horrible precedent from being set.
Make no mistake, irrespective of the liberal protestations about this being an investigation to "uphold the rule of law", this is nothing but blatant and overt appeasement of Barack Obama's rabid leftists base - nothing more, nothing less. Bush (and the GOP Congressional leadership) was right not to indulge such folly in 2001. Obama, once again proving that he's not half the man of Bush, to say nothing of Ford, can't contain his glee in this ex post facto witch-hunt.
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