The Torture Administration: Exposed; The Operatives: Indemnified & Immunized

by Damozel | According to Ambinder, Obama has redacted the identities of the torturers, but the rest is all there.  And, really, I have no words.  What Greenwald said:  "They are unbelievably ugly and grotesque and conclusively demonstrate the sadistic criminality that consumed our government."  Digby:  "I feel like vomiting right now. This is the very definition of the banality of evil --- a dry, legalistic series of justifications for acts of barbaric cruelty."

Conservative Andrew Sullivan, with whom I agree on this issue if on little else, agrees with Digby on the banality as well as the evil:

I've only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil....

It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith. When you place it alongside the Red Cross' debriefing of the torture victims, the fit is almost perfect.

Obama said:

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America's ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence.  That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on America's ability to right its course in concert with our core value, and to move forward with confidence.  That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.

The United States is a nation of laws.  My Administration will always act in accordance with those laws, and with an unshakeable commitment to our ideals.  That is why we released these memos, and that is why we have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again. (Via)

  Releasing the memoranda was the right thing to do, but by no means enough.  Holder has promised not to prosecute CIA officials who engaged in torture.  Frankly, I don't understand this.  Frankly, I find it shocking.I am therefore really rather surprised by Glenn Greenwald's tolerant response.  Greenwald discusses the pressure being exerted on Obama.  Former NSA Director Michael Hayden was on hand to express the opposition view and he is not happy. 

"These are the objections Obama had to override," says Greenwald.  And while I understand the objections, I can't believe that the concerns being expressed couldn't be addressed in some way short of a blanket exemption. 

Here's what the DoJ has had to say.

The Attorney General has informed the Central Intelligence Agency that the government would provide legal representation to any employee, at no cost to the employee, in any state or federal judicial or administrative proceeding brought against the employee based on such conduct and would take measures to respond to any proceeding initiated against the employee in any international or foreign tribunal, including appointing counsel to act on the employee’s behalf and asserting any available immunities and other defenses in the proceeding itself.

To the extent permissible under federal law, the government will also indemnify any employee for any monetary judgment or penalty ultimately imposed against him for such conduct and will provide representation in congressional investigations.

"It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department," Holder said.

After reviewing these opinions, OLC has decided to withdraw them:  They no longer represent the views of the Office of Legal Counsel.

Ambinder expounds on this:

[N]o CIA officers or officials who IN GOOD FAITH relied on the memos to interrogate prisoners will be subject to criminal prosecution, according to the AP. This is a victory for the CIA, which had been seeking a formal, public statement for its case officers, and which had been worried that the document's disclosures could subject many of them to future prosecution.  Now, even if Congress launches investigations, the CIA will be, more or less, safe.

Good faith, eh?  Interesting.  That certainly didn't work at Nuremberg.  No doubt it seemed to them at the time that they were working to protect their country for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by their lawmakers.  If they were a little overzealous in carrying out their duties, you couldn't accuse them of not acting in good faith.  They believed they should follow orders, even those orders.  They were hanged for it. 

But if the "brave" current day implementers of the administration's torture policy -- which some of us, by the way, really would do for no one; which some of us would rather be eaten by crocodiles ourselves than do at anyone's behest  -- must be protected from the consequences of their "good faith" then can't we hold the officials who procured these acts accountable for them? 

I'm sorry, but...."good faith"?  Really? Am I seriously supposed to believe that these operatives thought that smashing people against walls and shutting them into tiny boxes was really all right to do because the DoJ said it was?  They really and truly honest to God didn't in good faith know that torturing people is wrong, memo or no memo?

I guess not. Obama: "This is a time for reflection, not retribution."   

At TMV, Kathy Kattenburg says:

I was not aware that enforcing the law was a matter of “retribution.” Being a “nation of laws” means nothing if people who break those laws are not held accountable.

I’m not talking about the CIA interrogators. Perhaps the argument that they were acting in a good faith belief that their actions were legal is strong enough to justify immunizing them from prosecution. But the same is not true of the lawyers who wrote these twisted, perverted, atrociously reasoned memos. Nor is it true of the highest-ranking officials in our government — the president, the vice-president, the secretary of defense, and others — who told the lawyers to give them the legal cover they needed to design, carry out, and maintain their regime of torture....

[T]he people who authorized and justified the horrors those memos document have today been sent the clear message that they will not be criminally investigated or prosecuted for their acts.

For example, how about that certain judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals?  At The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin calls him "the forgotten man in torture studies of the Bush era."  Digby:

The man who wrote that memo now sits on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and his conscious judgment is at issue every single day. This country should not have anyone who authorized twisted and depraved behaviors sitting in judgment of anyone. If Obama refuses to take action against this man, the legal profession should do it for him and disbar him. And if the congress can impeach someone over illicit oral sex, they can surely impeach a federal judge for authorizing torture.

It's bad enough that we have war criminals running free. Having one of them sitting on one of the highest courts in the land is mind-boggling.

Toobin says: 

[Bybee] was confirmed by the Senate on March 13, 2003—some time before any of the “torture memos” became public. He has never answered questions about them, has never had to defend his conduct, has never endured anywhere near the amount of public scrutiny (and abuse) as Yoo.... It’s a lesson in the vagaries of politics, and timing, that Bybee could slip through the cracks of this story so easily.

Can he?  Has he?  These were crimes -- crimes procured by our own elected officials.  Speaking of the Gestapo?

Human beings were contorted into classic stress positions used by the Gestapo; they had towels tied around their necks in order to smash their bodies against walls; they were denied of all sleep for up to eleven days and nights at a time; they were stuck in tiny suffocating boxes; they were waterboarded just as the victims of the Khmer Rouge were waterboarded. And through all this, Bush and Cheney had lawyers prepared to write elaborate memos saying that all of this was legal, constitutional, moral and not severe pain and suffering.

Bybee is not representing justice in this memo. He is representing the president. And the president is seeking to commit war crimes. And he succeeded. This much we now know beyond any reasonable doubt. It is a very dark day for this country, but less dark than every day since Cheney decided to turn the US into a torturing country until now. (Sullivan)

Bruce Fein, former deputy attorney general under Reagan and frequent critic of Bush policies, doesn't cut Obama any slack here.

President Obama has embraced the national security psychology of the Bush-Cheney duumvirate not only in matters of secrecy, but the entire range of civil liberties abuses justified by a purported global and endless war against international terrorism.

Indeed, Obama has invoked state secrets in litigation to conceal torture, extraordinary rendition, illegal surveillance, or arbitrary detentions that have given rise to private damages litigation against former government officials. He has claimed that Bagram prison in Afghanistan is a sanctuary for United States lawlessness. He has asserted that the entire world is a battlefield against terrorism; thus, drones can be fired without a judicial warrant to kill persons suspected of Al Qaeda membership on the President's say-so alone.

Like President Bush, he has issued a presidential signing statement claiming plenary power over the use of the American military. He has claimed authority to detain United States citizens as "enemy combatants" indefinitely without accusation or trial.

In sum, on national security and the war on terrorism, Obama has shown that the more things change, the more they stay the same, despite his adept semantical juggleries.

I am sorry to agree with Fein because I want to support Obama, but agree with him I must and do.   For Obama, it may boil down, as everything boils down for him, to pragmatism and politics.  For me, it concerns matters impinging on my religion, my humanity, my respect for my country's laws, and my sense of our history as a people.

UPDATE:  Mel Goodman, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, gets it right at NO QUARTER.  Goodman's the author of “Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.”  As he apparently spent more than 42 years in the U.S. Army, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Defense, he seems to be in a position to know something about it.

Memeorandum has more.

RECENT BUCK NAKED POLITICS POSTINGS

Colbert on the Payday Loan "Reform" Act: "They'll Still Feel Like a Debt Pineapple is Being Hammered Up Their Ass, but They Will Have the Comfort of Knowing that that Pineapple Meets the Strictest Federal Standards"

DoJ to Release Torture Memos; but Obama Won't Prosecute

Was It the Teabags Talking? Rick Perry, Gov. of Texas, Says Texas Might Secede

Colbert: Spontaneous Grassroots Events Hosted by Fox

The Daily Show Tea Par-TAY! "Americans buy one million teabags to protest wasteful spending. "

A Courageous & Dangerous Act of Protest: Afghan Women Take a Stand

Progressives Ponder the Teabaggers & Teabagging Rhetoric [Yes, They Can -- Fool Some of the People All of the Time]

Taibbi & Others on the Authoritarian Right (Showing, Once Again, that You Really Can Fool Some of the People All of the Time)

Dept of Hollow Laughter: Right Wingers Incensed Over DHS Report on Rise of Right Wing Extremism

Multiple Teabaggings Everywhere: Teabaggings for Everyone!