Posted on 05/06/2009 6:24:23 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Shocked! SHOCKED I SAY!
NO INDICTMENTS FOR “TORTURE”?!
It turns out that even Obama’s Dept of Justice doesn’t want to indict the people who defined torture as Enhanced Interrogations. How could this be? That’s like saying that Khalid Sheik Mohammed wasn’t tortured! Yada yada [insert nutroots/far left talking points here] yada.
Guess what people: if you believed that President Obama released those seven year old “torture memos” out of anything other than a political distraction (conveniently labeled “torture” instead of “interrogation” by the Admin), then you got played, OWND, PWND, used, you were nothing more than a tool.
The memos were just a political distraction. Obama had to know what his own Dept of Justice was going to do before he let this cat outta the bag. If he didn’t, then he’s proven his ineptitude. If he did, then there can be no doubt that it was just a gimmick to fire up his strongest supporters with the thing they love/need the most: BUSH HATE.
So, now that no one’s gonna be indicted for “torture,” I wonder if anyone who wrote articles calling for the heads of Admin officials will write about this “travesty of justice,” or if Obama will get a free pass for-in effect-allowing the “torture” to go unpunished; for supporting “torture?”
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net ...
Too many Dems are in the docket.
More Hypocrisy From Obama….This Time On Torture Prosecution
posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 12:09 pm by : Curt
As a bookend to Scott’s earlier post comes some further details from Andrew C. McCarthy.
Obama and his hypocrisy knows no bounds:
It’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is nearing completion of a 220-page report which will recommend that Attorney General Eric Holder refer former Bush administration lawyers to their state bar disciplinary committees over purported ethical lapses in the legal analysis those lawyers drafted to justify harsh interrogation techniques that critics — including President Obama himself — have labeled “torture.”
Yet, even as the OPR report is being finalized, even after Obama declared himself open to the possibility of criminal prosecution against the Bush officials, and even after Holder promised to conduct an investigation that would “follow the evidence wherever it takes us, follow the law wherever that takes us” (emphasis added), the Obama Justice Department is relying on the very same legal analysis in order to urge a federal appeals court to reject torture claims. In fact, as the Obama Justice Department argued to that appeals court a little over a week ago, the torture law analysis in question has already been adopted by another federal appeals court.
The legal analysis was first developed in 2002 by two lawyers from the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC): Jay Bybee, the former OLC chief who is now a federal appeals court judge in California, and John Yoo, Bybee’s deputy who is now a law professor at Berkeley. Construing federal anti-torture law — which is derived from the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) — Bybee and Yoo’s memoranda stressed that torture is a “specific intent” crime. As the lawyers concluded after studying the relevant history, this means it was narrowly drawn by Congress and the ratifiers of CAT to make certain that only those who had an evil motive to inflict severe pain and suffering could be prosecuted. That is, even if the victim of government abuse would surely feel severe pain and suffering, there could be no finding of torture unless the responsible government official was acting with a deliberate and conscious purpose to torture him. It is this theory that has provoked howling on the antiwar Left, which alleges that it was the lawyers’ clever way of green-lighting unlawful prisoner abuse.
Yet, this very theory is now being advanced by the Justice Department under Attorney General Holder. On April 23 of this year, only a day after Holder — taking his lead from the president — promised to investigate Bybee, Yoo, and other government lawyers, the Justice Department filed a brief in a case called Demjanjuk v. Holder in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Ohio. The brief urges the federal courts to consider the same torture analysis over which Holder is targeting the Bush lawyers with such fanfare. You can read the brief here. [A PDF will have to do: After discussing the Justice Department’s hypocrisy on NRO’s Off the Page, I can no longer locate the brief on the site where I first found it on Sunday.]
The case in question is about John Demjanjuk, a Nazi collaborator, who doesn’t want to be extradited from the US. He argues that his extradition would violate torture laws and would cause his severe pain and suffering based on his age, bad health, and the abuse he expects to be inflicted on him.
What was the argument from the Obama admin?
…prosecutors argued to the court that even if Demjanjuk were put in severe pain, there could be no torture unless he could establish that government officials had an evil motive to inflict severe pain and suffering on him. As the Holder Justice Department puts it on pp. 20–21 of the elusive DOJ memo:
[T]orture is defined as “an extreme form of cruel and inhuman treatment and does not include lesser forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. . . . ” 8 C.F.R. § 1208.18(a)(2). Moreover, as has been explained by the Third Circuit, CAT requires “a showing of specific intent before the Court can make a finding that a petitioner will be tortured.” Pierre v. Attorney General, 528 F.3d 180, 189 (3d Cir. 2008) (en banc); see 8 C.F.R. § 1208.18(a)(5) (requiring that the act “be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering”); Auguste v. Ridge, 395 F.3d 123, 139 (3d Cir. 2005) (“This is a ‘specific intent’ requirement and not a ‘general intent’ requirement” [citations omitted.] An applicant for CAT protection therefore must establish that “his prospective torturer will have the motive or purpose” to torture him. Pierre, 528 F.3d at 189; Auguste, 395 F.3d at 153-54 (“The mere fact that the Haitian authorities have knowledge that severe pain and suffering may result by placing detainees in these conditions does not support a finding that the Haitian authorities intend to inflict severe pain and suffering. The difference goes to the heart of the distinction between general and specific intent.”) [my bold italics and brackets]. . . .
The Justice Department memo goes on to elaborate that, even accepting for argument’s sake all his claims of anticipated physical abuse, Demjanjuk had failed to state a legal torture claim because he had not shown that German officials had deliberately created and maintained conditions that were specifically intended to cause severe pain and suffering
~~~This is precisely the theory that Bybee and Yoo outlined in the memos that the Justice Department is now citing as a premise for subjecting them to ethical rebuke — and that Obama and Holder have intimated may be grounds for prosecution.
Amazing huh?
Not for this administration.
LOL....too damn true.
Despite all the angst-ridden palaver about torture over the past few weeks, NO ONE has stated a statutory or internationally accepted definition of torture. Thus all involved are bereft of a defined basis for discussion. They’re just talking past each other, signifying nothing.
Yep. Can't open up that can of worms.
What did I just say?
What did Pelousi say?
Interesting tactic the WH has developed: Take an issue, either real or contrived, play both sides and give everyone a little stroke, and end up full circle having done nothing you could be blamed for but something you can take credit for.
Must be a trick that community organizers are accustomed to....
Tricky stuff.
This is gonna make for an interesting DUmmie FUnnies.
He did teach the ACORN classes.
The List, ping
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