The Grand Inquisitors

If you read one news article about the Bush Administration this year, this is the one. It illustrates how far we've backslid and relinquished our moral authority in the name of petrifying fear.

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The legacy of the Bush Administration is one of official secrecy and deep human cruelty. Because they are so psychologically damaged, they project those feelings on everyone else, feeling that only through torture can they extract the information they need to carry out a so-called war on terror. In truth, the known factor is that torture doesn't work. It yields unreliable information as the victim tells his or her captors what they want to hear. It lso violates every moral precept you can imagine and invalidates any claim we make on human rights around the world. Bush's speech at the UN on the importance of human rights was met with nothing so much as laughter.

But there's a deeper meaning to all of this. You can argue that the main reason this nation is torturing terror suspects is because the executive branch has decided it can. And every attempt to put limits on that behavior, whether from the courts or from Congress, is met with retrenchment, as the issue becomes less about the policy and more about thumbing their nose at the other branches of government. These extreme interrogation techniques remain in effect, because until now nobody knew about them. This official quote is telling.

A White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, said Wednesday that he would not comment on any legal opinion related to interrogations. Mr. Fratto added, “We have gone to great lengths, including statutory efforts and the recent executive order, to make it clear that the intelligence community and our practices fall within U.S. law” and international agreements.

Yes, of course, but since the President is rewriting US law through executive orders and secret legal memorandums, what does that phrase even mean anymore?

When I saw Charlie Savage speak, the most distressing statement he made was that it would be very difficult for future Presidents to put these genies back in their bottles. It's unlikely a lot of these issues would reach up to the Supreme Court because the judicial system in this country doesn't offer advisory opinions. Anybody available to show standing is locked away in a detention center, and even though they are just now being allowed to request lawyers,
the awful Military Commissions Act strips their habeas corpus rights and keeps them in a rigged military tribunal system, which has just been kickstarted, after fixing some of the legal language that will allow those trials to move forward. We're not going to know about who the CIA tortured, where they were held, and what international conventions they broke. Even the next President will be unable to understand the scope of these crimes. Bush had an Office of Legal Counsel that essentially told him what he wanted to hear, that anything he decided was lawful could be carried out. The only exception was Jack Goldsmith, who did try to preserve civil liberties in the detention process, but when he testified before Congress this week, he was more concerned that there were too MANY lawyers in the OLC, not too few.

This is about expanding executive power. And so you know that this is really about Vice President Fourthbranch and the radical legal theories pushed by his pit bull David Addington and other like-minded ideologues. And they ran roughshod over the rest of the government.

Associates at the Justice Department said Mr. (Abu) Gonzales seldom resisted pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and David S. Addington, Mr. Cheney’s counsel, to endorse policies that they saw as effective in safeguarding Americans, even though the practices brought the condemnation of other governments, human rights groups and Democrats in Congress. Critics say Mr. Gonzales turned his agency into an arm of the Bush White House, undermining the department’s independence.

The interrogation opinions were signed by Steven G. Bradbury, who since 2005 has headed the elite Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. He has become a frequent public defender of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and detention policies at Congressional hearings and press briefings, a role that some legal scholars say is at odds with the office’s tradition of avoiding political advocacy.

Mr. Bradbury defended the work of his office as the government’s most authoritative interpreter of the law. “In my experience, the White House has not told me how an opinion should come out,” he said in an interview. “The White House has accepted and respected our opinions, even when they didn’t like the advice being given.”

But they never disliked those opinions, at least not under Gonzales and Bradbury. The Office of Legal Counsel, once a nonpartisan referee of Presidential power, the "Supreme Court" of the executive branch, is not a rubber stamp for the Administration's policies. And there's almost nothing that can be done about that.

This is the most despicable article you'll ever read. These people have destroyed the very fabric of the American experiment, as early historians liked to call it. This experiement is gradually blowing up in the lab.