Declassified torture memo backs Bush's authority

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

The Pentagon on Tuesday made public a now-defunct legal memo that approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, saying that President Bush's wartime authority trumps any international ban on torture.

The Justice Department memo, dated March 14, 2003, outlines legal justification for military interrogators to use harsh tactics against al-Qaida and Taliban detainees overseas — so long as they did not specifically intend to torture their captives.

Even so, the memo noted, the president's wartime power as commander in chief would not be limited by the U.N. treaties against torture.

And

The 81-page legal analysis largely centers on whether interrogators can be held responsible for torture if torture is not the intent of the questioning. And it defines torture as the intended sum of a variety of acts, which could include acid scalding, severe mental pain and suffering, threat of imminent death and physical pain resulting in impaired body functions, organ failure or death.

The "definition of torture must be read as a sum of these component parts," the memo said.

The memo also includes past legal defenses of interrogations that Yoo wrote are not considered torture, such as sleep deprivation, hooding detainees and "frog crouching," which forces prisoners to crouch while standing on the tips of their toes.

"This standard permits some physical contact," the memo said. "Employing a shove or slap as part of an interrogation would not run afoul of this standard."

The memo concludes that foreign enemy combatants held overseas do not have defendants' rights or protections from cruel and unusual punishment that U.S. citizens have under the Constitution. It also says that Congress "cannot interfere with the president's exercise of his authority as commander in chief to control the conduct of operations during a war."

Click here for the rest.

The release of this memo, which makes the President most responsible for the torture regime adopted shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan, coupled with the Rumsfeld memo shown in the recent Frontline documentary Bush's War, show that the White House bears full guilt for America's most deliberate atrocities in recent decades. But that's not amazing; we already pretty much understood this to be the case.

What's amazing is that articles of impeachment were not filed today after the story broke. I know, I know. Nancy Pelosi says impeachment is "off the table," presumably for strategic political reasons--that is, the Democratic establishment believes doing the right thing will hurt their electoral chances come November. But this is unacceptable. Winning elections doesn't matter when our political, legal, and governmental structures have become parodies of themselves: President Bush, while violating countless laws, has made our country no better than the Soviet Union, or Red China, or any other chronic and gross violator of human rights. He's made us an evil nation, because that's what a nation that condones torture is, evil. And people give Obama's preacher shit for saying "god damn America."

By allowing Bush to get away with this, the Democrats in Congress are just as responsible. They are just as responsible. The only way to redeem this country is to make sure that justice is done, which means throwing Bush and his entire cadre of evil out of office and into prison, hopefully for life. But the Democrats apparently see moral redemption as simply political strategy.

And that's amazing.

Disgusting, too.

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