1: Jose Padilla is a U.S. Citizen. If he can be arrested, whisked off to an extra-legal location, and tortured into insanity, then so can Glen Beck, Jonah Goldberg, and Jerry Pournelle. Or porkchop_d_clown, MNS, or myself.
2: The plea that "I vas chust followink Orders" has been used before. The people who used it ended up taking a long drop on a short rope. Do you really think we might owe them apologies for "criminalizing the political differences"? Maybe reparations to their families?
Then there's this.
1. The focus on water-boarding misses the main point of the program.Which is that it was a program.
Further down (a very conservative sentiment, btw.):
There is an elementary distinction, too often lost, between the moral (and policy) question -- "What should we do?" -- and the legal question: "What can we do?" We live in a policy world too inclined to turn lawyers into surrogate priests granting a form of absolution. "The lawyers say it's OK." Well, not really. They say it might be legal. They don't know about OK.
And, finally:
The underlying absurdity of the administration's position can be summarized this way. Once you get to a substantive compliance analysis for "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" you get the position that the substantive standard is the same as it is in analogous U.S. constitutional law. So the OLC must argue, in effect, that the methods and the conditions of confinement in the CIA program could constitutionally be inflicted on American citizens in a county jail.In other words, Americans in any town of this country could constitutionally be hung from the ceiling naked, sleep deprived, water-boarded, and all the rest -- if the alleged national security justification was compelling.
| < Alrighty then, | Blah, and blah. > |
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