Skip to main content

Oh, it's OK because they thought it was legal when they did it....

... Outgoing Attorney General Michael Mukasey has his own ideas, naturally, on whether there should be accountability for those in the Justice Department who wrote legal opinions supporting warrantless wiretaps and torture.

From Anti-war.com:

Some human rights groups have urged President-elect Barack Obama to launch criminal investigations into the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on al Qaeda terrorism suspects.

They also have questioned whether the Bush administration broke the law with its warrantless domestic spying program adopted after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Obama's advisers have yet to say what he will do, but one idea being considered is creating an independent commission, like the one that investigated the September 11 attacks, to examine the interrogation policies.

There has been speculation that President George W. Bush, before he leaves office next month and hands over to Obama, might give pardons to past or present officials implicated in the harsh interrogation methods or other abuses.

Mukasey told reporters at the Justice Department that he did not see the need for prosecutions or for pardons.

"There is absolutely no evidence that anybody who rendered a legal opinion either with respect to surveillance or with respect to interrogation policy did so for any reason other than to protect the security of the country and in the belief that he or she was doing something lawful," he said.

"In those circumstances, there is no occasion to consider prosecutions, there is no occasion to consider pardons," Mukasey said.


Notice the careful phrasing in the quotation highlighted in bold: the motivations of the people writing the opinions are the primary reason they should be free from accountabilit--they only advised breaking the law to protect us from terrorists.

Then the second answer is: They thought what they were doing was legal when they did it.

Yeah, right. Ignorance of the law has somehow suddenly become an excuse for attorneys.

I really don't want these folks prosecuted. I thought about it for a long time, and what I'd really rather spend the resources on is telling the whole story--with all the names attached--of who said what, when, and to whom--sort of like South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Prosecution will only make these individuals martyrs to their Statist, partisan supporters, and will provide the comforting illusion that government can bring us justice.

At best, government can bring us most of the truth, on a very good day.

Meanwhile, I'm waiting for Mukasey to crawl back into his hole, while grimly acknowledging that in his own way Michael Holder may not be any more interested in defending personal civil liberties than his three immediate predecessors.

Comments

Delaware Watch said…
Frankly, I'm for turning the lot of then over to the World Criminal Court for prosecution. When we act internationally, we should be subject to international law.
Anonymous said…
If we prosecute, then we ought to retroactively prosecute at least two chief execs whom we now regard with awe: FDR and Lincoln. Their actions make anything Bushco. did pale in comparison.

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?