Posted on 05/16/2009 10:20:04 AM PDT by shoptalk
Sen. Patrick Leahy wants an independent commission to investigate them. Rep. John Conyers wants the Obama Justice Department to prosecute them. Liberal lawyers want to disbar them, and the media maligns them.
What did the Justice Department attorneys at George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) -- John Yoo and Jay Bybee -- do to garner such scorn? They analyzed a 1994 criminal statute prohibiting torture when the CIA asked for legal guidance on interrogation techniques for a high-level al Qaeda detainee (Abu Zubaydah).
In the mid-1980s, when I supervised the legality of apprehending terrorists to stand trial, I relied on a decades-old Supreme Court standard: Our capture and treatment could not "shock the conscience" of the court. The OLC lawyers, however, were not asked what treatment was legal to preserve a prosecution. They were asked what treatment was legal for a detainee who they were told had knowledge of future attacks on Americans.
The 1994 law was passed pursuant to an international treaty, the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment. The law's definition of torture is circular. Torture under that law means "severe physical or mental pain or suffering," which in turn means "prolonged mental harm," which must be caused by one of four prohibited acts. The only relevant one to the CIA inquiry was threatening or inflicting "severe physical pain or suffering." What is "prolonged mental suffering"? The term appears nowhere else in the U.S. Code.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Thanks.
You’re a pathetic fool.
18 USC CHAPTER 113C - TORTURE 01/03/2007 http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/18C113C.txt
Sec. 2340. Definitions
“-STATUTE- As used in this chapter - (1) “torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control; (2) “severe mental pain or suffering” means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from - (A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (C) the threat of imminent death; or (D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality; and
(3) “United States” means the several States of the United States, the District of Columbia, and the commonwealths, territories, and possessions of the United States.
-SOURCE- (Added Pub. L. 103-236, title V, Sec. 506(a), Apr. 30, 1994, 108 Stat. 463; amended Pub. L. 103-415, Sec. 1(k), Oct. 25, 1994, 108 Stat. 4301; Pub. L. 103-429, Sec. 2(2), Oct. 31, 1994, 108 Stat. 4377; Pub. L. 108-375, div. A, title X, Sec. 1089, Oct. 28, 2004, 118 Stat. 2067.)
The Wikipedia has a pretty good article on the accession to the United Nations Conventions against Torture which was ratified in 1994. From Wikipedia:
“The US ratification itself, on 21 October 1994, came some six years after the spring 1988 signature and was subject to numerous (A) reservations, (B) understandings and (C) declarations. These can be read verbatim at the UN treaty website[4] and are parsed here as follows:
A. Reservations: The US made two reservations in connection with its ratification.
(1) The US would only be bound to prevent the “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” that are addressed by article 16 of the Convention[6][2] to the extent the term “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” was synonymous with the “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, or Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.
(2) Pursuant to treaty option, the US is not bound to resolve questions by international arbitration, but it “reserves the right specifically to agree to follow this or any other procedure for arbitration in a particular case.”
B. Understandings: The US announced certain interpretive understandings, “which shall apply to the obligations of the United States under this Convention:”
(1) Regarding the definition of certain terms in the Convention,
(a) “Torture”[7] must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain. Furthermore, “mental pain” refers to prolonged mental harm resulting from either
(1) the intentional infliction of severe physical pain;
(2) the administration of mind altering drugs;
(3) the use of other procedures that are also “calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality;”
(4) the threat of imminent death; or
(5) the threat that another person (e.g. a spouse or relative) will imminently be subjected to the foregoing.
(b) “Torture” must be an action against a victim in the torturer’s custody.
(c) “Sanction”[8] includes judicially-imposed sanctions and other enforcement actions authorized by United States law or by judicial interpretation of such law.
(d) “Acquiescence”[9] requires that the public official, prior to the activity constituting torture, be aware that such activity is imminent, thereafter violating his duty to prevent such activity.
(e) A noncompliance with applicable legal procedural standards[10] does not per se constitute torture.
(2) Article 3 forbids deporting a person “where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” The US, attempting to avoid the difficulty of interpreting “substantial grounds for belief,” interprets the phrase to mean “if it is more likely than not that he would be tortured.” This is essentially the preponderance of evidence test.
(3) Article 14 requires a State Party to provide, in its domestic legal system, a private right of action for damages to victims of torture. The US understands this to apply only for torture committed within territory under the jurisdiction of that State Party.
(4) The US does not consider this Convention to restrict or prohibit the United States from applying the death penalty consistent with the Constitution of the United States.
(5) The Convention will only be implemented by the United States “to the extent that it exercises legislative and judicial jurisdiction over the matters covered by the Convention.” In other words, the Convention per se is not US law. By itself, it has no legal effect within the US or upon its representatives. Rather, the Convention imposes an obligation[11] on the US to enact and implement such domestic laws as will cause it to come into conformity with the requirements of the Convention. This understanding is echoed in the declaration below.
C. Declarations: The US declared that the provisions of articles 1 through 16 of the Convention are not self-executing.”
Prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2006 in Hamdan, a legitimate position, clearly, for the United States was that our personnel, when they were dealing with unlawful combatants, were bound by the torture statute, title 18, U.S. Code, Section 2340. That is the controlling statutory authority. It defined torture. It was passed overwhelmingly by Congress in
1994.
It was passed by a vote of 92 to 8. Every current member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who was here in the Senate in 1994 voted for it. Senator Biden, Senator Feingold, Senator Feinstein, Senator Grassley, Senator Hatch, Senator Kennedy, Senator Kohl, Senator Leahy, and Senator Specter all voted for this act.
I asked Mr. Jack Goldsmith, former head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice under President Bush who resigned because he was not happy with some of the things that were being done, about the legal landscape regarding torture prior to the Hamdan decision—and he wrote a book about it.
I asked Mr. Goldsmith about the landscape prior to Hamdan—which found that the Common Article III of the Geneva Convention applied to enemy unlawful combatants detained at Guantanamo Bay. But that decision did not occur until the summer of 2006, so prior to that, pretty clearly, the authority that controlled the U.S. military in dealing with unlawful combatants, which we, I think, had every right to conclude were not covered by the Geneva Conventions, was the torture statute Congress passed
in 1994. That is the statute that our military was compelled to comply with.
And so the statute on torture is pretty clear. The people who drafted it wanted to make sure that whether in the United States or out of the United States that persons in our custody ought not to be tortured.
That certainly is an honorable and appropriate goal, and they did that. They passed this statute in which they defined torture:
As used in this chapter (1) ``torture’’ means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;
(2) ``severe mental pain or suffering’’ means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from—
(A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering.
And it goes on.
Playing music or segregating a prisoner or giving one prisoner less food or less quality food than you give another one, placing them in stressful conditions clearly does not qualify under this torture statute as inflicting severe physical or mental pain.
Our military had lawyers. As Mr. Goldsmith, who was a critic, really, of this administration’s behavior, said in his testimony and in his book, they were awash with lawyers. They had lawyers all over the place. Everything was read by lawyers. He said the CIA had 100 lawyers. I don’t know how many in the Department of Defense and others he made reference to were there trying to figure out how to conduct interrogations at a time when our [Page: S14163]
country had been attacked, 3,000 people had been killed, and we were trying to figure out if there were other cells in our country and other groups prepared to kill more Americans.
So....you read headlines and believe them, too....how special.
Jesus didn't.
L
But God doesn't see waterboarding as torture, at least not in the same sense as drilling holes in your kneecaps. God realizes that waterboarding sits on the borderline, in kind of a grey area. As such he's willing to hear utilitarian arguments regarding its use. God's position is that the Bush administration's approval of waterboarding was probably correct given the context (9/11 and all that). Thus it actually is not God's policy to send all so-called torturers to hell.
Soooo .... while we're waiting for our enemies to die of natural causes (clutching their express ticket to Hell with feeble, elderly hands), we're powerless to employ techniques to foil heinous plots in order to save innocent lives?
Mind you, I'm talking about techniques that reasonable people would agree fall far short of "barbaric cruelty . . . the mere mention of which sends chills down one's spine".
Seriously, must we submit as dhimmis to whatever unspeakable cruelty our enemies can imagine and implement in order for us to enter the Kingdom of Heaven?
Doesn't Psalm 82 ask, "How long will you defend the unjust and show partiality to the wicked?"
Further, it urges us to, "defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked."
LOL! Put down the pipe.
How do we define waterboarding? Is is torture? There is no permanent physical harm. No maiming. No public humiliation. There is a reactive fear of drowning which causes the subject to submit.
Seems to serve the purpose for interrogation, but waterboarding is not even effective punishment. There is no remorse, no recanting of wrong behavior.
We are talking about waterboarding people who think nothing of putting out eyes, cutting out tongues, handcuffing people and throwing them from five story buildings to watch them become paraplegics -- not to mention random beheadings.
The question really is, "What is the purpose of the activity?" Is this done to satisfy some sadistic impulse, (our enemies are guilty of that) or does it lead to the saving of lives? Therein lies your answer.
And you are?
For scarcely 10 generations on scarcely 10% of the earth's surface, civilized men who knew better for ages past, finally put a stop to that, at least on the part of their own governments. They drew greater support from their populace and even from men in other countries than any power had ever enjoyed before as a result, and conquered the world, and rule it to this day. The maxim that cruelty is the source of power is as refuted empirically as any proposition can be.
But it hasn't stopped the morally blind from continuing the attempt. Nearly every enemy we've ever fought has been on the other side of that line; there are maybe 3 exceptions in our whole history. It is what we exist as a civilization to fight, and it transcends all your petty concerns with the politics of the day and your pathetic fear in the face of very weak enemies.
You aren't among the just. There is your problem interpreting your favorite passages.
But I am surrounded by honorless cowards who think they are "conservative" when they are nothing of the kind.
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