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Liberal extremists seek disbarment of Bush lawyers

By: Dan Spencer (Diary)  |  May 18th, 2009 at 05:36 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Encouraged by the green light President Obama recently gave to his Attorney General, Eric Holder, left-wing liberal/progressive extremists are seeking disbarment of a dozen Bush administration lawyers linked to legal opinions concerning the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

The extremists are seeking retribution by persecution because these lawyers concluded, after a legal review, the enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, did not violate the legal prohibition of torture.

Any discussion of the enhanced interrogation techniques must specify how Congress defined torture. According to Victoria Toensing, once chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and deputy assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration, Congress defined torture in a 1994 criminal statute:

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.

Congress required, in order for there to be a violation of the law, that an interrogator specifically intend that the detainee suffer prolonged physical or mental suffering
as a result of the prohibited conduct. Just knowing a person could be injured from the interrogation method is not a violation under Supreme Court rulings interpreting “specific intent” in other criminal statutes.

Toensin also notes “the Senate rejected a bill in 2006 to make waterboarding illegal,” a fact which “negates criminalization” of the interrogation method. Congress did not prohibit use of waterboarding until 2008.

Attorney General Holder has already made his mind up about the left’s assertions that the legal authority justifying the CIA interrogation methods was more than wrong. Holder’s prejudgment of this issue creates an appearance of a conflict of interest, which ought to cause Holder to recuse himself, as Attorney General John Ashcroft did in the Plame investigation.

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COMMENTS

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  • casel21

    do these folks have standing? If they do, I can think of some complaints to be made against Holder.

    • farstar99

      If one were going to get Pelosi disbarred, does congressional immunity apply, and would the fraud/crime exception apply when the nation was the client?

  • tbeauchamp

    I was under the impression that the OLC’s job was to advise the President, not give legal cover to bend or break the law.

    Reading left, right and centrist blogs, the impression I am left with is that the OLC was at best unethical and at worst criminal.

    The conduct of the office should at least be investigated. It’s a shame that this issue cannot possibly be discussed in a non-partisan manner.

    • Jack_Savage

      I’ll tell you who ought to be investigated, pal, is all your lefty buddies that are giving aid and comfort to terrorists and gutting the CIA. We’ll start with Nancy Pelosi, going through most of the Democrats in Congress and ending up with this nitwit you call a president.

      I won’t mention the impression I get of you when I read your garbage, and before you go you might want to contemplate the points raised in the diary. Of course, that would require you to actually come to terms with whose side you are on in this “overseas contingency man-caused trouble once known as a war before we decided that Bush was still the enemy instead of terrorists”.

    • randy streu

      And, btw, no law was broken in this instance, period.

    • Vegas_Rick

      that these attorneys gave “legal cover” to break the law? How do you KNOW that they offered anything more than their honest legal opinion? Did your leftiness know that the Congress passed a law defining torture in 1994? Did you also know that that law DID NOT define water boarding as torture? Did you further know that that law was in effect until 2006? And, finally, did you know that all water boarding ceased in 2003, while the law was still in effect?

      I think you may want to do a little investigating of your own.

      • tbeauchamp

        I’m no expert, nor do I claim to be, but I read and saw interviews with John Yoo after he wrote the memos, and I heard the same thing from Gonzales where they said, and I’m paraphrasing, “After 911, the question we asked ourselves wasn’t what’s the least we can do, but how far can we push the line.”

        Probably not criminal, possibly unethical. You ask me what I know, and I don’t know anything. I can’t. People on the left scream bloody murder at people on the right, and vice versa. The truth is impossible to find. It doesn’t even exist anymore.

        I say it’s a bummer we will never find out what happened.

        I am for rule of law no matter who’s in charge.

        • Jack_Savage

          Seems like you are backing up a little bit – it is hard to reconcile:

          “I was under the impression that the OLC?s job was to advise the President, not give legal cover to bend or break the law.

          Reading left, right and centrist blogs, the impression I am left with is that the OLC was at best unethical and at worst criminal.”

          with:

          “Probably not criminal, possibly unethical.”

          Why don’t you get your story straight and get back with us? And FWIW, the truth does exist. It’s just that no one on your side is interested in hearing it.

          • tbeauchamp

            1.) If lawyers in the OLC acted unethically, they should be disbarred.
            2.) A non-partisan third party should find out if they did.

            You disagree?

          • http://andrightlyso.com/ civil_truth

            The only way to accuse the OLC lawyers of unethical actions is to change the statutes after the fact – or least the accepted interpretation after the fact. Such a change is inherently partisan with the only purpose of punishing political opponents.

            Since the process is inherently dishonest and prejudicial (in the strict sense of the word), appointing a “non-partisan third-party” is strictly whitewashing an inherently partisan proscription.

          • tbeauchamp

            Tho I think there’s a difference between unethical and illegal. Wouldn’t unethical be decided by the bar and not by statutes, or do I read it wrong?

          • Jack_Savage

            Since I need to remind you:

            “I was under the impression that the OLC?s job was to advise the President, not give legal cover to bend or break the law. ”

            Remember that? Seems like you have already made up your mind on this, unless I am not understanding. You believe it is obvious that they acted at LEAST unethically, perhaps criminally, then ask whether lawyers who act unethically should be disbarred. Sorry, I’m not playing.

            An non-partisan third party? Like the 9/11 commission? Maybe Al Gore? How abot Ward Churchill? Don’t hand me that garbage. When someone like you says “non-partisan third party” you mean “liberal hack who hasn’t been outed as a liberal hack – yet”. Sounds so…so….fair, and yet we have seen the results. Again, I’ll pass, thank you.

            I’ll ask you to stop the whiny “boy, I wish we could just investigate to find out the truth.” You have plenty of fishing expeditions going on right now, but just make sure some of your boys (and girls) don’t wind up getting caught in the net.

            Try Kos. You’ll be happier there.

  • Big Apple Infidel

    A few short years ago, the Democrats were viewed as a party sliding into the abyss of insignificance, as noted by conservative Dem Zell Miller and others. Now that the political winds have shifted, the resurgent leftists want to engage in show trials of their political opponents on the right.

    What happens when the wind blows back to the right? Imagine if abortion becomes defined as murder by a new jurisprudence, with retroactive prosecutions and disbarring of its supporters and practitioners. The same could be said of the use of racial preferences being seen as a civil rights violation, whenever they are used against anybody, white or black, regardless of motivation. Perhaps other left wing policies can be criminalized as well, after-the-fact.

    The political winds may shift back and forth; however, like weapons of war, these weapons upon our political discourse, once used, will never be sheathed.

    • http://andrightlyso.com/ civil_truth

      As in one-party government. The bullying you’re already seeing is a downpayment once the Obama administration gets their people in the correct places and brings down the full power of the Justice Department, the Treasury (including the IRS) and the various regulatory agencies against all possible dissidents – backed up by a compliant judiciary. Not to mention the Ministry of Propaganda to orchestrate the media and otherwise rewrite history.

  • http://www.800cart.com Ron Robinson

    It seems to me that under Holder’s legal theory, the first person he should investigate should be Speaker Pelosi. After all, she got the earliest word on this ‘torture’ and she did nothing, and raised no objections.

    So she should not only be disbarred, she should be vigorously prosecuted.

    • Next93

      I’m pretty sure the VP’s offcial authority over this matter was close to zero, whereas the Speaker was in a position to introduce legislation to either outlaw the practice or restrict funding. So if we’re going to start holding kangaroo courts, Pelosi should be one of the first, it not THE first.