Musings on the hearings
I won’t try to chronicle how they are being destroyed here.
But they are being destroyed.
Just in this semi-preliminary hearing today, they were destroyed.
At the end, all that one of their finest legal minds, a former JAG officer Lindsay Graham had to close with after the testimony and evidence had been presented with boiled down to was…..Torture Worked.
And….since it worked, we cannot “take torture off the table for future presidents.” We don’t want to “chill” the efforts of the intelligence community in the future. “Chill their efforts” to use torture.
Why oh why wouldn’t we WANT to chill efforts to torture? Why wouldn’t we want to make sure that torture, is the absolute last resort, where it is only used in those 0.0000001% of those cases where it might be “needed” to stop a “ticking time bomb?”
Which is a scenario that has never occurred, and that no one claims has?
Why wouldn’t we
Waterboarding is torture, Graham says. Torture is wrong, Graham says. But we don’t want to stop the president from ordering torture if we need to torture.
Even though other techniques work, we still need to have the option to torture.
And if we are scared, as we were after 9/11, if we decide….wrongly, Graham says…..then that is just a “mistake.” And there should be no consequences for mistakes.
“Do you see how complex this is?” Graham concludes.
No.
It is only complex if you have to argue the position that there are times when we have to make what is patently and admittedly illegal….legal, even if doing so….is a mistake.
Yes that IS “complex”…..because it is ridiculously illogical.
It just doesn’t hold up. It will take some time to prove it doesn’t hold up. It will take time to work through the legalese to destroy their argument.
But it will be destroyed.
And then what?
There will now be full investigations. Dick Cheney and the Republicans insist on it, lol, by saying we have to have evidence that torture “works.”
So when we have those investigations and all of there arguments are methodically and thoroughly destroyed….what then?
Will we REALLY put Cheney on trial? Or Bush? That has never happened, never. We have been pushing hard on this for years now. What do YOU think will happen?
What will the end game be?
That, after the arguments for torture are destroyed, will be the BIG question. It is easy to say “throw em in jail.” But unless you really think Cheney or Bush will be the first Vice President or President to actually be jailed…and if you do, please imagine the process and implications of that for us….what do you think will happen?
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Graham said.
Yes Senator, it is biting you, your party, and your former president right now.
…have been destroyed: they will invent new ones.
… I’ve made it no secret I think Cheney, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, etc., should be tried and if found guilty, receive the full penalty of the law (excepting the death penalty, which I am against), and that would mean jail.
What do I think will happen?
I think this issue is too big to politick away.
I don’t know what will happen.
Just saw a DVD of Frost/Nixon a couple days ago. Here he was, working to rehabilitate his image, maybe make a comeback, he’s been pardoned so no worries there … and then he agrees to a little teevee interview.
I don’t know what will happen. But something will happen. I don’t know how justice will be served, but I believe it will be served.
Sorry for the faith based answer — I am a terrible chess player!
from watching the Hearing. Im really glad that I (attempt to at least) follow the liveblog commetns though, cuz theres lots of stuff I still miss… like Zelikow worked for Condi, I forgot. Im not sure what to make of him.
shit. Gibbs…. on now.
for moving forward do not rest on the crimes themselves but are a reflection of their illogical defense. When this horror show was occurring the laws were there, both sides disregarded them or adjusted them to fit their illegal agenda. The ‘complexity’ has always boiled down to disregarding the laws for an illegal fascist agenda. The answer is simple we are either a republic of laws, or not. Ticking time bombs, always lurk somewhere and the concepts that we as a nation state have the right to abolish common law in exchange for ‘security’ is blatantly illegal. Security does not exist in this world never has. Mistake, my ass it was calculated and planned an exercise in brutality for the sadists who lurk in the shadows to ‘protect us, unleashed by the hijackers of our government.
I don’t think the present government any branch, will do a damn thing about this. Who is there in the halls of power now who stood the fuck up instead of stopping these criminals. Even those who opposed the war argued their case without condemning the basic immorality and illegality of the doctrines and myths that allowed this to happen. Their incapable of separating the political from the law.
They are also masters at weaseling the law to fit their agenda. They would have to admit that they aided and abetted these torturers, they would have to be ready to stop calling them colleagues, they would have to throw them out of their club. Most importantly they would have to own up to the absurd logic that reigns down bombs on people who we’re told threaten us and labeling them as potential terrorists. Nothing in our history gives me hope from the Collage of the America’s to the forced march of Native Americans we seem unable to face what we do, in the name of national interest or worse freedom.
they will go around repeating their justifications. They will repeat themselves because they think they can create truth with their lies.
They will create truth with their lies in they eyes of the people who want it to be so. Unless we stand up to stop them. And we can really put Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld — and all of the architects of torture and the Iraq war and domestic spying…
…but we have to see the connections between all of these incidents and call them out as systematically as they were executed.
(Okay, so I’m a little dark today…more diaries forthcoming.)
but what I’m afraid is likely to happen either way was I think very well described in April 2007 by scribe, one of the lawyers who comments and diaries regularly at Talkleft, who wrote a short diary on impeachment, and in one of his own comments to that diary in reply to another commenter had this to say, that I think applies strongly here if not nails the crux of the matter. He was discussing the legal concept of “eternal precedent“:
That I think is what is risked if these people are allowed to walk with no accountability and no trials… And those who stand with Bush and Cheney, or oppose war crimes trials for them, will do so at the peril of being on the wrong side of history.
And that history, either way, will also be a history of Barack Obama’s presidency.
911
No “attack”
No 3 buildings falling down at free fall speed
No war
No torture
And no “in this post 911 world” bullshit.
Ok, Lindsey, if it works so well, where’s bin Laden? Surely after 8 years and dozens of Al Queda’s “#2” men–as well as other lower-ranking ones–have been captured, our wunderkind interrogaters should have been able to torture those guys into giving up their leader, right? (Hat tip to Jesse Ventura for bringing up that little inconvenient truth in his recent Larry King interview.)