Send in the US Marshals for these criminals. Do it now.

[seafan]

Attorney General Michael Mukasey, when directly asked today whether he would open a criminal investigation on the CIA's use of waterboarding as a torture technique, after CIA chief Michael Hayden has confirmed the use of waterboarding:

"No, I am not, for this reason: Whatever was done as part of a CIA program at the time that it was done was the subject of a Department of Justice opinion through the Office of Legal Counsel and was found to be permissible under the law as it existed then," he said.

Mukasey said opening an investigation would send a message that Justice Department opinions are subject to change.

And how did "the law exist then"?

Because Assistant Attorneys General John Yoo and Jay Bybee *redefined* torture in a series of legal memos in 2002, that they thought would protect Bush as he ordered detainees to be tortured.



It is time to send in the US Marshals for these criminals. Bush and Cheney must be impeached and forcibly removed from power, indicted for breach of the US Constitution, war crimes and violation of international law.
.

Redefining Torture
PBS, October 18, 2005


The most notorious document among the memos drafted by President Bush's legal advisers as they analyzed how far the U.S. could go to extract intelligence from those captured in the war on terror is known as the "Bybee memo." (PDF File) Some call it the "torture memo."

The Aug. 1, 2002 memo, sent from Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee to Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to the president, parsed the language of a 1994 statute that ratified the United Nations Convention against Torture and made the commitment of torture a crime. To be torture, the memo concluded, physical pain must be "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." And inflicting that severe pain, according to the memo, must have been the "specific intent" of the defendant to amount to a violation of the statute. Human rights groups reacted with horror when the Bybee memo was leaked to the press in June 2004, and it was quietly rescinded by the Justice Department on Dec. 30, 2004, just days before Gonzales was to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his nomination as attorney general of the United States. (Meanwhile, Bybee in 2003 had been nominated and confirmed as a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.)

But this very narrow definition of torture was only one part of the memo, which largely was written by Assistant Attorney General John Yoo. It also asserted that the U.S. ratification of the 1994 torture statute could be considered unconstitutional because it would interfere with the president's power as commander in chief. (Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was asked about this part of the memo during his confirmation hearings.) Taken in concert with the Congressional authorization passed on Sept. 14, 2001, which gave the president sweeping power to conduct the war on terror, and other recently released documents, the memos flesh out the Bush administration's expansive, and controversial, view of executive powers.

Here, commenting on this extraordinary memo, are: Dana Priest, Washington Post reporter; Jane Mayer, staff writer at The New Yorker; John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general, Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel 2001-2003; Bradford Berenson, associate White House counsel from 2001 to 2003; and Mark Danner, author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror.

..... (interviews follow)

[ursi]

1. totally agree ....

[dchill]

2. Mr. Reid? Ms. Pelosi?

Anyone? Anyone? Hello?

[ladjf]

3. Mukasey is the quintessential slime-ball.

[ladjf]

4. You are right. But, of course, like everything else, it will never come

close to happening. The crooks are ruling and that's that.