Front & Center: Should Bush Torture Regime Architects Be Charged As War Criminals?

Despite the excesses of the Age of Bush — notably the embrace of torture and willful subjugation of the rule of law — the U.S. remains a substantially open and just society. So it was inevitable that the consequences of the administration’s foulest deeds would begin nipping at the heels of the perpetrators sooner or later.

As far back as 2004, participants in White House meetings with Vice President Cheney, David Addington and Alberto Gonzales understood that these torture regime architects were objecting to calls for minimum treatment standards for detainees not just because of their belief that the U.S. had to be protected from future terror attacks but because they needed to protect themselves from future legal repercussions, and backpedaling would be evidence that they understood they were legally liable.

And so amidst the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War II, a proceeding that comedian Stephen Colbert darkly joked was “the most historic session of traffic court ever,” there are the first serious discussions about whether Cheney, Addington, Gonzales and others should be considered war criminals themselves.

While charging these officials with war crimes would certainly appeal to the emotional side of people like myself who as a proud American takes personally how my country has been hijacked by thugs in pinstripes, it is beyond the pale to think that a U.S. court of law would address the war-crimes issue as such. (That would be more likely were any of these officials to set foot in a number of European countries.)

More pertinent to the discussion — and there must be a discussion and not merely a partisan lynching party led by left-leaning screaming memes — is whether these officials knew that what they were doing might be illegal.

The answer is an emphatic “yes” because of the great lengths to which they went to first deny the existence of torture as a policy and then to wrap themselves in the obfuscations of a handmaiden by the name of John Yoo, whose singular talent in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel was to take desired outcomes such as giving torture a veneer of legality by green-lighting its use by backfilling with gibberish-filled memos. Attorney General Michael Mukasey actually has managed to outdo Yoo in advancing legal flotsam such as his view that Justice’s lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of the president and the president cannot commit crimes when he acts under advice of these lawyers.

How then to proceed?

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index with links to previous torture-related posts.