I had mostly forgotten about Clinton-impeachment manager Asa Hutchison until he showed up a few weeks ago as a shill for the National Rifle Association. At that point, my impulse was to vomit on his face. But I see that he is a little more complicated than I thought. He has teamed up with James Jones, a Democrat and former ambassador to Mexico, to issue a non-partisan report condemning the Bush administration for torture.
Mr. Hutchinson, who served in the Bush administration as chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration and under secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said he “took convincing” on the torture issue. But after the panel’s nearly two years of research, he said he had no doubts about what the United States did.
“This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. He said he thought everyone involved in decisions, from Mr. Bush down, had acted in good faith, in a desperate effort to try to prevent more attacks.
“But I just think we learn from history,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “It’s incredibly important to have an accurate account not just of what happened but of how decisions were made.”
He added, “The United States has a historic and unique character, and part of that character is that we do not torture.”
Well, we’ve ratified a treaty that says that we won’t torture, so I suppose it would be a good idea if we didn’t.
In addition, the United States is a signatory to the international Convention Against Torture, which requires the prompt investigation of allegations of torture and the compensation of its victims.
But we can avoid fulfilling our responsibilities under the Convention Against Torture by simply refusing to call what we did torture.
The question of whether those methods amounted to torture is a historically and legally momentous issue that has been debated for more than a decade inside and outside the government. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of legal opinions from 2002 to 2005 concluding that the methods were not torture if used under strict rules; all the memos were later withdrawn. News organizations have wrestled with whether to label the brutal methods unequivocally as torture in the face of some government officials’ claims that they were not.
I think that if Asa Hutchison, who tried to remove President Clinton from office for lying about an affair and who served in multiple positions in President Bush’s administration, can admit that we tortured people that the “new organizations” can drop the pretense that this is an open question.
But, of course, that would have certain logical and legal implications. Wouldn’t it?
Well we had some False Equivalencers out the other day on this same topic, arguing that Cheney did absolutely nothing more than any prez after WWII (and before!) and that anyone who thought Bushco represented a new strain of executive lawbreaking was a lamebrain partisan simpleton and ignorant fool. This is usually done with no actual references to specific past policies and practices that were “the same” as Cheney’s.
As for whether there was ever a legitimate legal question about whether, say, water boarding fell under a legal definition of “torture”, that was always a rightwing lie. All four JAG chiefs declared that waterboarding was “torture” under applicable military law and this has been the military’s position since WWII. Those unequivocal JAG opinions were always ignored by the corporate media.
So yes, Asa, your Repub prez Cheney authorized US personnel to torture prisoners in US custody, both military and civilian, under the quise of intelligence gathering. That was a new practice, and one for which a number of senior “lawyers” in the Justice Dept had to concoct tendentious and strained memos to rationalize the new policy and attempt to protect those who were to doing torturing. That was also new development.
To argue that Bushco was not some serious extension of presidential lawbreaking in a wide variety of areas is deeply unconvincing and suspicious apology knitting. When a Prez admits that he has violated a federal statute explicitly enacted to govern his behavior (the FISA), and that he has the constitutional power to do so without court authorization, we are dealing with a radical extension of rightwing authoritarianism and not a simple replication of past behavior.
There are a number of very serious long run problems to the rule of law which our dalliance with an openly law-flouting executive have bequeathed to us. One big one that is never discussed is that the Founders’ mechanism for dealing with a law breaking executive–impeachment–has been destroyed forever as an effective and available political device.
If Cheney and Bush were not to be impeached after the unchallengeable revelations concerning their lawbreaking (both as to torture and illegal surveillance), then there is no basis to impeach ANY executive for their actions, and we must openly admit that Congressional partisanship now trumps the legal operation of gub’mint, the definition of a banana republic. The constitution’s impeachment clauses are now a dead letter, and American gub’mint need not make any pretense of conforming to law.
That is a principal legacy of Chenyism, and of those apologists who maintain that nothing should have been done about the various revelations of presidential lawbreaking in the past decade. We are a country that has the facade of law, but not the reality. Say what you want about the (many) sins of the past, but Nixon was impeached, removed from office and disgraced. That can no longer happen in our degenerating nation.
Well, not to any Republican Presidents, anyway.
Actually, the House Judiciary Committee introduced articles of impeachment but the House never voted on them.
Say what you want about the (many) sins of the past, but Nixon was impeached, removed from office and disgraced. That can no longer happen in our degenerating nation.
I disagree. Any president who did what Nixon was caught doing to domestic political opponents would still be impeached. Meanwhile, if Nixon had been caught running the EIP, he wouldn’t have been impeached for it (just as the Articles of Impeachment did not ultimately include the Cambodia bombing).
Presidents have always been given a great deal more latitude on military actions than domestic.
There’s a pretty simple test for whether it’s torture: would we call it torture if it was being done by the North Koreans or Cubans or Iranians?