How Bush's Tortured Legal Logic Won

[laststeamtrain]

How Bush's Tortured Legal Logic Won

By Robert Parry
April 17, 2009

Almost as disturbing as reading the Bush administration’s approved menu of brutal interrogation techniques is recognizing how President George W. Bush successfully shopped for government attorneys willing to render American laws meaningless by turning words inside out.

The four “torture” memos, released Thursday, revealed not just that the stomach-turning reports about CIA interrogators abusing “war on terror” suspects were true, but that the United States had gone from a “nation of laws” to a “nation of legal sophistry” – where conclusions on law are politically preordained and the legal analysis is made to fit.

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Calling the period covered by the four memos a “dark and painful chapter in our history,” Obama added that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

The lack of accountability for Bush and his lawyers, however, may mean that future Presidents will follow Bush's lead and assign some clever legal wordsmiths the job of finding ways around criminal statutes, international treaties and the U.S. Constitution.

If legal language can be interpreted any way that a President wishes – and if the U.S. Supreme Court is stocked with like-minded judges – then laws will no longer protect anyone, whether a suspected Middle Eastern terrorist or an American citizen.

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http://consortiumnews.com/2009/041709.html

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. Bush. Such a stupid, ignorant piece of shit. But so much damage. Inconceiveable....

[Laelth]

3. All the more reason to prosecute. n/t

:dem:

-Laelth

[Stuart G]

4. K & R

[Bluenorthwest]

5. Mr President:

our entire legal system is based on laying blame for the past. All crime prosecuted is past crime. Are we going to stop prosecuting everything, because it was done in the past?
That line of reasoning is insane. Obama is wrong.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

6. It's ironic

The right endlessly complains about criminals, for example, getting off on a "technicality", but, as can be expected from they party for whom hypocrisy is in never ending supply, they themselves appear to have a knack for finding ways to make something that everybody reads as illegal and carefully parsing and, forgive the pun, torturing it to the point that the law becomes meaningless and/or allows them to do whatever they say they want to do.
:eyes: