The Virginian-Pilot
©
WASHINGTON
Rep. Bobby Scott, who was one of President Barack Obama's earliest and most vocal Virginia supporters, has joined in a challenge to the administration's apparent reluctance to prosecute former officials responsible for harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists.
The Newport News Democrat and 15 other Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder this week urging appointment of an independent counsel to pursue allegations that suspects were tortured.
"There is abundant, credible evidence of torture, and the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of detainees," the lawmakers wrote. "Criminal investigation is not only warranted, it is also required" under the Geneva Conventions, they added.
The letter argues that an independent counsel would shield the Justice Department from conflict-of-interest concerns that would accompany any investigation by its own lawyers. The White House has released memos indicating that interrogation tactics Obama and Holder have condemned as torture were found legally permissible by Justice Department lawyers in the Bush administration.
Holder's office has not answered the letter, but a spokesman for the attorney general told The Associated Press that the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility will investigate whether the memos meet standards set for department lawyers.
"Torture is never justified in a civilized society," Scott argued in a statement released by his office. He rejected claims, including some by former Vice President Dick Cheney, that investigators were able to thwart serious terrorist attacks using information obtained in interrogations where waterboarding and other controversial tactics were used on detainees.
Scott added that the memos "seem to have been designed not to provide solid legal opinions, but legal cover for those who knew they were breaking the law."
Dale Eisman, (703) 913-9872, dale.eisman@pilotonline.com
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RussB
Your hypothetical daughter's college calls to say two agents from the Department of Homeland Security took your daughter off campus 2 weeks ago and no one has seen her since. After a week of phone calls, you're told authorities were concerned about long distance phone calls made to her dorm room and a library book she'd checked out and you're told you should stop making waves.
Do you sit tight and let them water board her a couple dozen times or send her off to Bulgaria to be brutalized by someone other than official U.S. personnel to find out whether she's actually just a college student?
that old saw?
Discounting the unlikely problematic ticking bomb scenario there is no justification for torture.
Mr. Scott, I would love to
Mr. Scott,
I would love to hear the answer to this question.
A 20 megatom nuclear warhead is set to detonate in the cargo hold of a ship in Newport News. We have captured the leader of the group that brought it in and armed it. We know there is less than one hour before it detonates. We have asked him nicely if he will tell us exactly where it is and how to disarm it and we have failed.
Now with the knowledge that if this warhead detonates it will kill hundreds of thousands and render hampton Roads uninhabitible for decades would you approve waterboarding or other methods to extract the information from this terrorist or would you stick to your position and allow the entire region and its inhabitants to perish in agony?
I await an answer for anyone against these interogation techniques.
New Rule
How about we have a new rule that you cannot post unless you have a fundamental understanding of the issue being discussed? For the 100th time, please stop referencing the Geneva Convention as a disqualifier for protection against torture. It is utterly irrelevant to the discussion. We are also signatories to the 1984 UN Torture Convention. These knuckleheads we pick up are covered under its protections. Also, for the hundredth time, investigation and prosecution under the provisions of the convention are not optional. February Gallup poll showed over 60% of Americans wanted investigations / prosecutions, with over half of that total looking for criminal prosecution. If this is a political stunt by the current administration, why are they not pushing for these investigations / prosecutions?
"the stripping of liberties from United States citizens"
Give the new administration time, people! 8 years of Bush/Cheney gutting our Constitution, stripping away American's civil rights, replacing logic and science with inflamatory propaganda slogans, and insipidly misleading the willingly uneducated to believe that torture and brutal repression are the new American way will not be corrected overnight.
We see that here, but we can't afford to let those fringe views hijack what the majority of Americans know to be true. The truth will always out.
Ah - There’s nothing more stirringly patriotic...
Than the good old fashioned, Post-Electoral Perp-Walk & Congressional Show Trial... Where the new administration’s partisan healers, shamans & bag-men get to dance naked around the camp-fire in stylish war-paint & shake their juju sticks & mojos at the previous administration for “screwing everything up so badly.”
Not withstanding that it is factually a gross over-exaggeration to compare the G.W. Bush administration’s so-called ‘constitutional’ & ‘human rights’ violations, with Hitler’s systematic enslavements & genocidal slaughters of the civilian populations of Europe under the NAZI regime...
The hardline spin-meisters & policy wonks among the Democratic Party would love to have the rest of America believing that we desperately need to have a Nurembergesque public political bloodletting in order to cleanse our tainted souls & to save face with the rest of the world.
Now I've heard it all.
Now I've heard it all. Opposition to torture is an attack on the "AMERICAN WAY." Luckily this sort of hysteria fomented by the radical right is destroying the Republican party, the RR's path to power. All of their chicken-little xenophobic fear and smear will have no effect other than engineering their own irrelevance. Good night and good riddance.
Milufo - you have it exactly backwards
Torture is not the Mercan way, although it had been since the Bush Admin... which is the anomaly. Call it "The Bush Way".
If you take a look at the list of Socialist countries (cuba, china, vietnam, North Korea), there is a propensity for their gubmints to torture. So with Obama recinding the Bush torture practices, Obama is moving the country away from Bush-era socialism.
Now, if you have a problem with the DOJ prosecuting people for crimes committed (ie war crimes), then thats a different story. And if the DOJ did prosecute, then that would illustrate that THE LAW DOES MATTER.
Life Today
Doesn't everyone get it? This is simply another attack on the AMERICAN WAY. Everyone needs to recognize what is happening here, SOCIALISM. This is the same thing that all the other Socialist countries around the world do when political power changes hands, change the laws and prosecute the old party and their supporters to consolidate their position. The Law doesn't matter, only power.
It is indeed a slippery slope we walk on here, "Stop Terrosim" they cry "make us safe", then they cringe at waht had to be done to do so. But, on the other hand if an attack did happen then the same people would want to prosecute because 'they' "didn't do everything in their power to stop it".
This is a political argument and not one of logic and common sense.
The real crime that should be prosecuted is the stripping of liberties from United States citizens. Where now Christians, Libertarians, Rush Limbaugh listeners, etc. are labeled at "potential threats" and investigated at will, without cause or warrant.
Read history, this is what the Nazi party did pre-WWII, but wait...we can't because it has been removed from the history books.
My friends we are in trouble.
Law-breaking torture advocates
Besides the mind-boggling fact that people are advocating torture, equally mind-boggling is the supposedly "persuasive" arguments made by said law-breaking torture advocates.
The idea of NOT torturing & instead lawfully adhering to the Anti-torture convention of which the US is a signator supposedly means the following to a suprising # of posters:
Not torture = "hugging terrorists"
Not torture = "what next, rubber bullets"
Not torture = "Bobby Scotts heart is filled with hate"
Not tortuer = "Bobby scott does ungodly acts"
Not torture = What about JackBauer24 ticking timebombs?
Not torture = but others do!
Not torture = "Lets give terrorists a time out"
The "logic" is tortuous.