Legalizing Torture (washingtonpost.com)
In a stinging lead editorial, the Washington Post denounced the Bush administration's stated willingness to disregard United States and international law in order to extract information from prisoners through torture.
There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of "national security." For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan -- that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism. The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy -- even if it is true, as the administration maintains, that its theories have not been put into practice. Even on paper, the administration's reasoning will provide a ready excuse for dictators, especially those allied with the Bush administration, to go on torturing and killing detainees.
The Post points out the obvious: that the standards articulated by the Bush administration will now serve as a justification for almost any depraved act toward American servicemen and civilians by our enemies, in stark contrast to our former published policy of applying no interrogation methods that we would not be willing to have Americans undergo.
One of the most shocking aspects of the Justice Department's memorandum on torture is that the Post reports that it was signed by a man who has since been rewarded with a Judgeship on one of the highest federal courts in the country. It is a scandal that a man who could argue that the President could legitimately engage in a vicious and depraved disregard of the law should be entrusted by that same president with the duty of upholding and interpreting the law. If the Post report is correct, Jay S. Bybee should resign in disgrace.
