The machine of government can be considered, in many aspects, a science that efficiently functions based on how well it adheres to rules and laws. In order to retain compatibility, functionality, resiliency, and most importantly relevancy, the powers of government are divided amongst itself and held in check by a checks and balances system that is open to scrutiny by all its parts but most assuredly by the general public. Indeed, the relevancy of our form of government depends on how well it is maintained -- how its power is distributed; how open it is to the system of checks and balances; etc.
While reading code today for our product at work, I came across functionality that gave the system the intelligence to keep track of the direction the user is going so that when the user returns from a cell that has a popup list, the user can continue in the direction they were going. Likewise, government should be the catalyst for this type of functionality for its citizenry. It should act and govern in a manner that ensures we are progressing forward.
Bush and his Administration, however, have been like a virus to the 200-plus-year-old democratic system. They've usurped too much power for their warped crusade for a better America and a better world. It's weakend the functioning capability of government and the economic and financial state of the United States.
The latest evidence of this is the revelation of the Torture Memo, prepared by the Walker Working Group (WWG). WIthin its pages reside evidence of the misproportionment of power to the president and his legal justification for the use of torture on detainees.
Michael Froomkin, Professor of Law and author of the blog Discourse.Net, explained in his masterful analysis of the WWG torture memo "Apologia Pro Tormento" that the presidential powers argued for are lawless and wholly without merit:
The discussion of Presidential powers begins (page 20) with the observation that in the exercise of the commander-in-chief function, and in particular in the conduct of operations against hostile forces, the President enjoys "complete discretion". That the President’s powers are at their greatest in these circumstances cannot be disputed. But while the discretion is indeed very great, I do not see how it could possibly be read to include the authority to commit war crimes, even pre-Nuremburg. And today it clearly cannot include that authority, at least without explicit Congressional authorization. Thus, the entire discussion of Presidential power is based on a premise so false that any student who has taken introductory International Law should be able to recognize its error. And as any logician will tell you, when you begin with an erroneous premise, you are in trouble.
Nonetheless, it appears that this memo became the backbone for the interogation methods used against detainees at Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, including Abu Ghraib.
Today, Matthew Yglesias agrees that Bush overstepped his power and the rule of law:
[T]orture aside, this business of writing secret memos proclaiming that the president has an inherent power to selectively abrogate the laws is an absurd repudiation of constitutional government. The president holds an office and has to administer the state according to the laws as they stand. He can ask that the laws be changed, but he can't just ignore them. Lately, we've had Reagan on the brain over here. As we know, Ronald Reagan was not a fan of Aid to Families With Dependent Children ("welfare"). Nevertheless, the checks kept on rolling until congress changed the law. Just because Reagan was the president, and thus in charge of the HHS Secretary and other underlings charged with administering the program, didn't mean they could stop it just because they wanted to.
Similarly, Bush didn't cut taxes by sending the IRS a memo one day telling them not to bother doing any collecting, any more than Clinton raised them by just sending people around to gas stations to pick up some extra cash. There's a process here, and the president needs to follow up. He's not the Czar, the laws don't bend to his whims.
The Houston Chronicle also commented on the gross misuse of law from the highest levels to justify torture:
The United States' moral authority to call for the rule of law and respect for human rights has been undermined by legal machinations the Bush administration undertook to justify torturing prisoners taken in the war on terror....
The memos were obviously concocted to defend acts that are clearly beyond the bounds of a civilized nation.
The memos support the view that the prisoner abuses uncovered at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were not merely the grave mistakes of a few soldiers, but resulted from policies formed at the highest levels of government.
Jonathon Tepperman's article "An American In the Hague?" today in The New York Times echoes the opinion, suggesting that the relevation of the memo will have its consequences:
Even if no smoking gun is ever found to directly link American officials to the crimes,...they could still find themselves in serious jeopardy under international law. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, officials can be held accountable for war crimes committed by their subordinates even if they did not order them - so long as they had control over the perpetrators, had reason to know about the crimes, and did not stop them or punish the criminals.
This doctrine is the product of an American initiative. Devised by Allied judges and prosecutors at the Nuremberg tribunals, it was a means to impute responsibility for wartime atrocities to Nazi leaders, who often communicated indirectly and avoided leaving a paper trail.
More recently, the principle has been fine-tuned by two other American creations: the international tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which were established in the last decade by the United Nations Security Council at the United States' behest. These tribunals have held that political and military leaders can be found liable for war crimes committed by those under their "effective control" if they do nothing to prevent them....
...[I]f American officials are not held legally accountable, the damage abroad could be even more severe. Part of the terrible legacy of Abu Ghraib may be that the United States will find it difficult to prosecute foreign war criminals if it refuses to accept for itself the legal standards it accuses them of breaking.
The travesty of our acts of torture and the continuing obfuscation, denial, and secrecy of Bush and his administration in regards to this definitely sets us on a dangerous direction with catostrophic effects both domestically as well as internationally. It has everything to do with our legitimacy and relevancy.
In a closing remark today, Josh Micah Marshall exclaimed that we Americans are "like contestants on Wheel of Fortune with a long phrase spelled out in front of us with maybe one or two letters missing. We know what the letters spell. It's obvious. We just don't have the heart to say it out loud."
Maybe this recognition is the turning point. Eventually, someone will say what needs to be said; and the truth will be like a stone that became a great mountain that filled the whole earth.
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