From The Beginning

I posted a short piece last month about Rumsfeld approving extraordinary “interrogation techniques” from the LA Times. Looking at it now, the timing implies that this is the same shocking memo that the Wall Street Journal reported on in detail today.

What the Wall Street Journal Story doesn’t say is that the permission to torture was sought by none other than our good friend General Geoff D. Ripper, the man currently in charge of cleaning up Abu Ghraib prison. From the earlier LA Times story:

Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 a request five months earlier by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who had arrived at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in November 2002 to oversee prisoners. Miller sought permission to use a broad range of extraordinary ‘nondoctrinal’ questioning techniques on an Al Qaeda detainee, a general with the Pentagon’s Judge Advocate General’s office said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

[…]

The effort to define how far interrogators can go in pressuring detainees for information without violating international law exposed the rift between interrogators and JAG lawyers, who considered some of the techniques Miller proposed to be illegal.

‘You had intelligence officials that might have been pulling in a direction that was different from the lawyers,’ Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said. ‘It’s a competitive process.’

[…]

Rumsfeld trimmed the list of requested interrogation techniques by about one-third, and he insisted that he personally approve a ‘handful’ of techniques, the senior Pentagon lawyer and the JAG official said. Rumsfeld approved the revised proposal in April 2003.”

I commented at the end of my earlier piece that if it is true that Rumsfeld himself signed off on specific acts of torture it was the kind of evidence that war crimes trials were made of. Silly me. Today’s WSJ story reveals that the administration knew very well they were giving General Ripper explicit permission to commit war crimes and went to extraordinary lengths to fashion legal loopholes in order to set Don, Dick and Geoffrey’s minds at ease that they couldn’t be prosecuted. And they did it all under the newly discovered doctrine of Presidential Infallibillity.

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a “presidential directive or other writing” that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is “inherent in the president.”

Unbenownst to anyone up to now, the US Constitution is apparently the basis for a legal dictatorship. Very interesting indeed that such a radical new interpretation of presidential power should be “discovered” by an administration that was installed by a 5 to 4 vote by the Supreme Court, isn’t it?

What’s the old saying, “begin as you mean to go on?” They went on as they began, all right, using all levers of power in service of their desired goals regardless of legal precedent or constitutional legitimacy. We shouldn’t be surprised. This is what people who pursue power for its own sake always do.