Monday, June 14, 2004
Torture Memo
Cliff Notes on the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel memo, courtesy of Michael Froomkin. Beats having a Law degree!
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This is not a draft, but it’s not an action document either. It’s legal advice to the Counselor for the President. The action document was Gonzales’s memo to Bush.
This OLC document is a legalistic, logic-chopping brief for the torturer. Its entire thrust is justifying maximal pain.
Nowhere do the authors say “but this would be wrong”.
Lots of the (lousy) criminal law legal reasoning in this memo is picked up in the Draft Walker Working Group memo
This memo also has a full dose of the royalist vision of the Presidency that informs the Draft Walker memo. In the views of the author(s), there’s basically nothing Congress can do to constrain the President’s exercise of the war power. The Geneva Conventions are, by inevitable implications, not binding on the President, nor is any other international agreement if it impedes the war effort. I’m sure our allies will be just thrilled to hear that. And, although the memo nowhere treats this issue, presumably, also, the same applies in reverse, and our adversaries should feel unconstrained by any treaties against poison gas, torture, land mines, or anything else? Or is ignoring treaties a unique prerogative of the USA?
