Violation of the bovine restrictions in the Geneva Conventions by using a minotaur for "enhanced interrogation" in an unnavigable labyrinth? 

Say it ain’t so.

Apparently Dick Cheney really wanted a griffin for the interrogator job, but he was too flighty.

Ahhhhh, The Onion.

Bless them for taking our policies and media to the extremes.  And, in the process, making it crystal clear how far we’ve really gone over the edge of the cliff.

Eugene Robinson lays it flat out:

For the Bush administration, torture was a delicate business. The aim was to injure but not incapacitate — to inflict precisely enough pain and terror to break a subject’s will, but no more. To calibrate the proper degree of abuse, the torturer needed an accurate sense of how much agony the subject’s mind and body can tolerate.

In the administration’s program of "enhanced interrogation," this expertise was provided by doctors and psychologists — professionals who are supposed to heal and comfort. A new report by Physicians for Human Rights assembles the evidence and reaches a sickening but inescapable conclusion: "Health professionals played central roles in developing, implementing and providing justification for torture."

Dwell on that for a moment, especially if you believe that the Bush administration’s decision to submit terrorism suspects to medieval interrogation practices was somehow justifiable — or even if you believe that torture was wrong, but that now we should "look forward" and pretend it never happened. This is how torture warps a society and distorts its values.

You tell me something that intricate and meticulously planned was just a few isolated incidents of rogue folks with no orders from the top of the chain of command.  Or that we all don’t shoulder some of the responsibility for it happening in our names. 

Or that there wasn’t a concerted effort to hide what we were doing because people knew it skirted legality.

Or that conduct like this helps the US instead of creating a more robust recruiting poster for the people we claim to be fighting against…all the while becoming them.  

We have traded our liberty and our long-standing fight for human rights around the world for the deliberately hyped illusion of a little safety.

And we have forfeited our souls in the process. 

The President himself has said he doesn’t want to look backwards, but now he’s allowing his Attorney General to do just that.

Leaving aside the disturbing Pre-Crime connotations straight out of Phillip K. Dick’s Minority Report, Steele’s utter ignorance of how DOJ is supposed to properly function is stunning. Or it’s deliberately feigned obtuseness, I can’t decide.

Fortunately, the DOJ has internal guidelines and rules which, when followed, outline exactly how and why political interference with the adinistration of justice is frowned upon in legal circles.

For the why of this, we can refer back to an earlier era when the rule of law wasn’t cast out detritus on the GOP’s floor.

. . .there is a decided emphasis on DOJ leadership and prosecutors being the ones who determine whether an investigation or prosecution is warranted — and no one else.

The memo references Berger v. US, wherein SCOTUS laid out the primary obligation of government attorneys:

…they are representatives "not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.

Guidelines are then laid out [PDF] for communications with the President on particular prosecutions where the national policy interests are implicated. Such communications shall be initiated by the DOJ only where appropriate, and only to the extent that prosecutorial discretion considerations allow.

There are expressly written guidelines on communications with members of the WH staff, monitoring by supervisors, and details which types of communications are or are not appropriate.

Had Steele bothered to have anyone on his staff check, they’d have found that these guidelines [PDF] have been in effect since last spring. And that this has been internal DOJ policy since the 1940s, with the exception of…wait for it…the Bush years.

News flash to Steele — you don’t investigate until after a bad act has been alleged, but don’t let a little thing like probable cause stand in your way. I suggest reading beyond Dick Cheney’s talking points.

You could learn a few things just picking up the Federalist Papers — try Fed. 51 for starters.

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.

There is a very good reason the Founders were suspicious of concentrating power in any one branch. Because back then they knew balance and the rule of law was necessary to prevent corruption and overreach.

Why is it that we have to keep learning those lessons over and over again…

Because it’s that thing they do:

The art of the hissy fit lies in your ability to bring the entire media over to the fainting couch over even the most absurd allegations of impropriety and insensitivity. Pearl clutching and hankie wringing have become extremely important hardball political tactics, as hard as that is to believe. It’s especially effective if you can do it over some things you yourself have brought into the public square.

So, why the breathless reportage and ominous internal hand-wringing? Because avoiding the real backdrop makes for a more conflict-laden story:

Holder notified the White House that he was reluctantly leaning toward naming a prosecutor to review whether laws had been broken during interrogations — the very thing Obama had said he wanted to avoid. And the word Holder got back, according to people familiar with the conversations, was that the decision was up to him….

The just-announced review by career prosecutor John H. Durham is being closely followed by the intelligence community for clues about whether it will remain fixed on the low-level CIA employees and contractors who may have stepped out of legal bounds. Once Durham starts digging, some analysts said, the veteran prosecutor could uncover evidence that leads him higher up the chain of command in an inquiry that grows broader than the what the Justice Department outlined Monday.

What follows is a quote from Dick Cheney excoriating the probe.  With nary a mention that it was Cheney who instigated, steered and manhandled these policies into place despite their illegality.

Why is Cheney so irate? Because bluster gets him column inches without having any real fear of direct questions of his own involvement. Why? Because that just isn’t how things are done in the Beltway.  No inconvenient truths that might rock your access boat.

Here’s an inconvenient truth that press accounts fail to mention:  Why does DOJ have this investigation? Because internal CIA punted it over to them in a direct referral for investigation of potential criminal wrongdoing.

So why the review from Holder? Because when the allegations referred by CIA IG include murders, you can’t pretend you didn’t see anything worthy of investigation.  Especially with the potential of a heavy Addington thumb on the prior DOJ investigative scales. (more…)

Today, it’s another inane installment of the continuing saga of the GOP’s longest-running program wherein the buck stops anywhere but here. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the overwrought and not-so-dulcet tones of Kit Bond and friends, in Accountability For Thee, But Not For Me…

The torture memos produced by the OLC were never meant to be seen and parsed by the public. These memos used incredibly tortured logic to justify acts which, in prior wars, the United States prosecuted as war crimes. The ACLU has put together a video of these words of tortured logic being read aloud.  Watch it.

An interesting pattern has emerged among the federal judges charged with reviewing the habeas petitions of Gitmo detainees. Chisun Lee of ProPublica explains: A close examination of the decisions shows that some of the fears about sending terrorism cases to civilian courts have not been realized.

Some people are ruled by courage and justice, and some are ruled by fear and petty personal ambition. See if you can tell which is which between Sen. Lindsey Graham and Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld.

First, via Spencer, Lt. Col Vandeveld:…“If someone is acquitted, then, as we do today, we should release him,” Vandeveld says.

Outtake from Farenheit 9/11.No idea why, but this just makes me smile:The witnesses recently called by the special prosecutor, former government officials said, include the agency’s top officer in London and Porter J. Goss, who was C.I.A. director when the tapes were destroyed in November 2005.

Destruction of evidence is not something you should just forgive and forget.