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a little light reading about torture
Sep. 16th, 2006 10:48 pmThis article is a couple of weeks old, but if, like me, you're a couple of weeks behind on your current events, you might want to take a look. The jist of it is not too revolutionary -- that whatever your moral feelings about torture, it yields notoriously unreliable information -- but there was some interesting stuff I hadn't heard, such as how the FBI, who had a strong success rate with incentive-based questioning methods, bid for and lost jurisdiction over the al-Quaeda 14, in favor of the more vicious and less knowledgeable CIA.
This, however, was the part I found most interesting:
Five years after 9/11, Americans are understandably eager to finally get an unfiltered--read nonpoliticized--look at our "high value" captives, the transnational actors, so-called, at the center of global drama. An authentic legal process would give them that--which is why the Administration is dead set against it. The problem is not really with classified information. Most of what these captives told us is already common knowledge or dated; the U.S. hasn't caught any truly significant players in two years. However, discovery in such a case would show that the President and Vice President were involved in overseeing their interrogations, according to senior intelligence officials. Subpoenas on how evidence was obtained and who authorized what practices would go right into the West Wing.
And as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bradhicks pointed out in his last entry, war crimes aren't just high crimes & misdemeanors -- a.k.a. impeachable offenses -- they're death penalty offenses.
Wait. Let that sink in a second.
If an interational court decides that prisoners in U.S. custody were, under the personal supervision of the President, tortured in defiance of the Geneva Convention, then the President of the United States could (although probably not til January of 2009) face trial and execution for crimes against humanity.
Have you wrapped your head around it yet? Yeah, me either.
( for the record, my position on torture, justice, and crimes against humanity )
This, however, was the part I found most interesting:
Five years after 9/11, Americans are understandably eager to finally get an unfiltered--read nonpoliticized--look at our "high value" captives, the transnational actors, so-called, at the center of global drama. An authentic legal process would give them that--which is why the Administration is dead set against it. The problem is not really with classified information. Most of what these captives told us is already common knowledge or dated; the U.S. hasn't caught any truly significant players in two years. However, discovery in such a case would show that the President and Vice President were involved in overseeing their interrogations, according to senior intelligence officials. Subpoenas on how evidence was obtained and who authorized what practices would go right into the West Wing.
And as
bradhicks pointed out in his last entry, war crimes aren't just high crimes & misdemeanors -- a.k.a. impeachable offenses -- they're death penalty offenses.Wait. Let that sink in a second.
If an interational court decides that prisoners in U.S. custody were, under the personal supervision of the President, tortured in defiance of the Geneva Convention, then the President of the United States could (although probably not til January of 2009) face trial and execution for crimes against humanity.
Have you wrapped your head around it yet? Yeah, me either.
( for the record, my position on torture, justice, and crimes against humanity )
