Making Us Proud
Apr 2nd, 2008 at 7:31 am by Susie
You’ll notice that not one of our presidential candidates did anything to stop this treatment - or this executive power grab:
The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president’s ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.
The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce “an extreme effect” calculated to “cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality.”
Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents had not been previously disclosed.
Not to be picky, but one of our presidential candidates wasn’t even in the Senate in 2003, and wasn’t in a position to do anything about it, and given that the memo was classifed, I’d be willing to bet the one who WAS in the Senate didn’t see it either.
now Carl Levin and Pat Leahy on the other hand…
brendan’s right. but also, in both clinton and mccain’s favor, there really was nothing anyone in the senate could have done to stop him. i mean, the point was that bush decided he was not subject to any laws because being “commander in chief” made him exempt from all acts of congress. all a senator could have done is push through more legislation that he felt he could ignore.
you can’t check a president who doesn’t believe in checks and balances.
Uh, hello? There’s the remedy provided in the Constitution - impeachment.
true, but impeachment would have to start in the House.
And we all know how that’s coming along.
On a related note, Speaker Off-the-Table has a Democratic challenger this year: Shirley Golub.
Instead of taking Obama and Clinton to task for torture memos that were out of their control, maybe it’s time to put some much-needed pressure on Pelosi to start impeachment proceedings before its too late (or to punish her for abdicating her constitutional duty).
Not only should the memo figure prominently in impeachment proceedings, but it should also find some use in a War Crimes trial.
Render their butts to the Hague, starting 21 Jan 2009.
by the way, you can email John Yoo’s boss and colleagues here.
Yoo should be publicly shamed and driven from Berkeley. I have written the dean, forwarding Greenwald’s column, and explaining that I have encouraged my child (who’s approaching college age*) to look at other colleges until Yoo leaves.
*sure, Sam’s only 4, but he gets older every day. The way I see it, if Yoo can interpret the powers of the CiC so broadly as to legitimize the torture of children, then a growing 4-year old can definitely be defined as “approaching college age”. It’s not like he’s aging backwards…