On that whole, "looking forward" thing

[pecunium]

I see a lot of apologists (mostly for torture, but some for things like wiretapping), saying we need to look foreward, not backwards.

One.. huh? Prosecutions have to look bacwards. A crime has to happen before it can be prosecuted.

That's the first oddity. The other one is that I saw, in the dim and distant past of 2008, a lot of people saying, "Well sometimes the law has to be broken. If a cop knows someone has info, and the only way to get it is to torture the guy, then he needs to do it. No jury will convict someone who saves a kid's life by beating up a perp."

This is often followed by a bravura follow-on: "I'd do it if I had to, and I'd turn myself in and face the music."

Ok, lets assume that's true.

Why aren't the people who authorised the tortures saying, "Yeah, I ordred peopel to do it. I had to, it was to save lives. So go ahead, charge me. I'll prove it was needed, and no jury will convict me?"

Comments

[calimac.livejournal.com]

"If a cop knows someone has info, and the only way to get it is to torture the guy"

That's two "if"s that have to be, but outside of fiction cannot, be shown to be justified.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Sort of.

They are conditional. Look at the German case. Cops had a guy who confessed to a kidnapping, but wasn't going to tell them where the boy was.

The cop threatened to torture him. Guy said, "OK, here is the place I left the boy."

Argument is (and this is the classic buried baby) there was no time to wait for other methods to work. (I think this wrong, but that's not important to the hypothetical), so the cop resorted to force.

The cop got the info, turned it over, an turned himself in.

He, as I recall, was convicted/copped a plea.

I think the cop was wrong. I think the sentence justified (as I recall he got a short term in prison. I also recall the torture was a threat, not an actual blow, but I could be wrong).

I also admire him a bit. He had a tough call. He made it. He made no excuses for it. He didn't try to cover it up, or say it was right. Just what he thought he had to do.

Well, these guys all say they were in a bigger pickle than this cop.

They also say there was nothing they did which needs to be investigated. John Bybee refuses to answer Senate questions (hey... maybe that's grounds for impeachment... one can always hope).

In short, they don't act as if they really think what they did is so lily white they will be acquitted.

[ironphoenix.livejournal.com]

Yeah, see, that is the essence of civil disobedience, to me: doing something that is against a law because one sees it as the right thing to do, accepting that the law will impose consequences, and facing those consequences squarely.

Whether he was right to threaten the perp pr not, how and why he went about it can't be faulted.

What bothers me about the other folks is that they won't stand up and defend their convictions publicly before the law and the people who elected them or those who appointed them, and face down the law for imposing a sentence for doing what must have been so clearly the right thing. It was the right thing, wasn't it? Wasn't it?

Next you'll tell me that there isn't a Santa Claus...

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

This is one of the basic elements of the movie Dirty Harry, which does about as clearly certain job of setting up a justification for torture as you can get. And it doesn't work because it is too late for the victim.

Of course, as film viewers we have a certainty about events which the characters maybe ought not to have. And things follow as they do to make a dramatic story, rather than to be realistic.

I don't think Harry Callahan is willing to face a court. He knows he's right, dammit! But there's one lesson from it.

Don't boast to a cop about committing a crime.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Taken as a stand alone, Dirty Harry is enigmatic. The movie ends with him, looking more than a trifle worn/depressed, skipping his badge, like a stone, into San Fransico Bay.

As presented, he did what he felt he had to do, and his role as a cop is finished.

That gets lost in the baggage making more films created.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten that last scene.

Yeah, all the sequels rather spoil the effect. Though Sudden Impact is a bit more than a .44 Magnum killfest. Eastwood made other tough-cop movies, and the rest only seem to use the character for the catchphrase.

[jpmassar.livejournal.com]

Seems like Cheney is pretty much daring people to charge him.
But no one will call his bluff.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I don't think so.

What I see him doing is saying, "There is nothing wrong with what happened. Bush authorised it, lots of people were saved, and all I did was not disagree."

Then he goes on about memos he knows won't be released, so he can say, "It would all be cleared up, if those were public."

It's several bait and switch operations; Perhaps designed to make the whole thing stay away from the question of what was done with the coerced confessions about al Qaeda/Iraq.

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

"Prosecutions have to look backwards. A crime has to happen before it can be prosecuted."

Unless one is living in a Phil Dick novel; sometimes I wonder if we are.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

... and no jury will convict me

I'm pretty sure this is why the Obama administration won't pursue prosecution. They're afraid of creating another Ollie North.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Only if after the conviction nothing much happens to them.

What I want, ain't gonna happen.

I believe evidence used to persuade Congress to allow the war was based on lies extracted by torture.

I believe Cheney and Bush knew that.

I want that to be proved.

Then I want the both of them impeached.

Then we can turn them over to the Hague.

That will fix it at home, and leave the rest of it to public scrutiny abroad. We won't be seen as pulling a whitewash.

Instead, we have Obama arguing Bush positions, and saying, "it would be bad to reveal what the world already knows" about Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

I agree with you. I would love to see open trials and an airing out of this whole shitpile.

But I don't have to live with the political consequences of it. Back during the Clinton impeachment hearings, Henry Hyde was pretty open about saying it was payback for Nixon. Having the former leaders of the opposition party taken away in handcuffs would make it impossible for Obama to push his agenda through.

And I'll bet they're afraid of how it will play in the media, too, with the officials being brought in front of Congress (as they inevitably would) wearing their suits and looking upward in every framed shot, while far right politicians and their allies in the media talk about scary brown-skinned men with beards, and all the tough choices involved in protecting curly-haired little girls across America.

I don't think the current administration trusts the American people to come out solidly on the right side of this, and I think their doubts are justified. I believe Obama wants a legacy of repaired/expanded social programs that will become so popular they'll be pretty much permanent. I don't think he wants to risk a legacy of unpopular prosecutions and opposition backlash.

Which sucks. It's exasperating and depressing, and it makes me ashamed. There are so many deaths because of the lies of the previous administration, and none of them will be personally held accountable. You know what I think will happen? Exposes will be written for the next decade or so. Movies will come out about it. A government commission will be formed in about 20 years to bring the truth to light, and a hundred and fifty years from now, the U.S. president will go on the national media and formally apologize for the torture and civilian deaths.

And the media will criticize him for it.

Sorry. Feeling cynical today.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Depends on who/how it's done.

Part of what the Republicans forget is the reason Nixon stepped down is he was told the Republicans in the House would vote to impeach,and the Republicans in the Senate would convict.

I wish that had happened. It would have made it harder for the, "partisan" actions of the "Left" bringing down the Noble Nixon.

It could still happen. If the evidence is strong enough, then the only people who will be able to vote against impeachment/conviction will be obviously voting party, not facts.

And it could be 435/100 to impeach/convict, the "GOP can do no wrong crowd won't believe it, even if Bush admitted to buggering baby guniea pigs for drug money.

So the real question is, who is willing to be grown up enough to say, "This demands real investigation."

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

I don't think a person who's no longer in office can be impeached.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Nope. There is nothing which prohibits it. In part because impeachment is purely related to governance. The penalty for being convicted isn't prison; it's loss of pension, and prohibition from futher office.

The only legal controls on impeachment are here:



US Code TITLE 28 App. FEDERAL ARTICLE Rule 609

Subdivision (b). Few statutes recognize a time limit on impeachment by evidence of conviction. However, practical considerations of fairness and relevancy demand that some boundary be recognized. See Ladd, Credibility Tests—Current Trends, 89 U.Pa.L.Rev. 166, 176–177 (1940). This portion of the rule is derived from the proposal advanced in Recommendation Proposing in Evidence Code, § 788(5), p. 142, Cal.Law Rev.Comm’n (1965), though not adopted. See California Evidence Code § 788.

Note that the boundaries have not been defined.

I point to this article: "...AND STAY OUT!": THE CONSTITUTIONAL CASE FOR POST-PRESIDENTIAL IMPEACHMENT

While the ability to hold a "late impeachment" seems fairly clear to me, it is not undisputed. To be sure, the Constitution does not address the issue directly one way or the other. Nevertheless, there is, as professor Michael Gerhardt has put it, a "surprising consensus" among scholars on this issue.

English practice allowed post-term impeachment. Other perceived excesses of the English impeachment system were limited explicitly by the Constitution. Impeachment can only be for high crimes and misdemeanors; punishment cannot include death, as it did in England; a supermajority is required for conviction. The English practice of post-term impeachment, however, was not similarly limited in the Constitution.

There is even precedent for it. Sec. War Belknap was impeached after he resigned.

The Senate tried him, though it fell one vote short of conviction, on all five articles.

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I wasn't aware of that. Thanks.