Truthout: What Real DOJ Trial Attorneys Say About Torture

[marmar]

What Real DOJ Trial Attorneys Say About Torture
By Elizabeth de la Vega
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Sunday 18 November 2007

If there is one thing the Bush administration is good at, it's talking points: simple, stupid slogans. And when it comes to torture, the theme du jour is that we are all too simple and too stupid to understand just what is and is not prohibited. More than anything, White House officials want us to believe that the law of torture is so terribly confusing and vague that no lay person could comprehend its complexities. Hell, not even the attorneys can really sort it all out. How, then, the not-so-subtle implication would be, could anyone be held responsible for violating it?

Consider, for example, Dana Perino on October 5, 2007. This was the press conference where the White House spokesperson made it clear, stopping just short of stamping her feet, that she was not pleased about the reporters repeatedly asking her to define the term "torture." She had already told them the day before: "It's a very complicated legal matter" better left to the experts - particularly Steven Bradbury, interim head of the Office of Legal Counsel. Unfortunately, Bradbury's memos were, and are, secret, so she couldn't talk about those. At the same time, she noted, the memo that is public - written in December 2004 by the former acting head of OLC, Dan Levin - "is extremely dense. It's very complicated." Since Dana Perino is not an attorney, she couldn't really say much about that either.

Newly sworn Attorney General Michael Mukasey, on the other hand, is an attorney, not to mention a former federal prosecutor and veteran federal judge. But, hiding behind a mask of lawyerly caution, he has deliberately perpetuated the same false idea, refusing to acknowledge to the Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats the starkly obvious conclusion that waterboarding is illegal under US law on the ground that legal opinions must be based on "real life." Further, as if to somehow prove the difficulty of the issue, Mukasey padded his written response with a nearly full-page listing of statutes and treaties he would have to analyze before voicing an opinion on the matter.

What Perino and Mukasey are doing, of course, is deliberately obfuscating the law of torture to support the president's effort to inoculate himself and his henchmen against possible future prosecution. Perhaps they can succeed in confusing at least some percentage of the public (an increasingly small percentage, it appears), but they are not fooling the prosecutors. Indeed, before uttering even one more patently ridiculous and legally unsupportable word in furtherance of this shameful campaign, Bush administration officials should find out what their own Justice Department career attorneys have already said about the law of torture - not in secret memos, but in publicly filed court documents.

They needn't look far. As it happens, while the president and his many talking heads have been defending torture in Washington, lawyers from the Department of Justice and the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida have been prosecuting it. In a case officially titled United States v. Charles Emmanuel, they have charged Charles "Chuckie" Taylor Jr., son of the former president of Liberia, Charles McArthur Taylor, with committing and conspiring to commit acts of torture on behalf of the former Liberian government's Anti-Terrorism Unit. The statute under which Taylor Jr. is charged - Title 18, United States Code, Section 2340 - is the very law that contains the definition of torture Bush administration appointees seem to find so befuddling.

The DOJ trial attorneys handling the real-life prosecution of Chuckie Taylor Jr. are, on the other hand, not confused in the least about the law of torture. Here is what they've had to say: ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/111807Y.shtml

[Solly Mack]

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