| by  
				Tom Engelhardt Quotes of the 
				week:  "Congress lacks 
				authority … to set the terms and conditions under which the 
				president may exercise his authority as commander in chief to 
				control the conduct of operations during a war…Congress may no 
				more regulate the president's ability to detain and interrogate 
				enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct 
				troop movements on the battlefield. Accordingly, we would 
				construe [the law] to avoid this difficulty and conclude that it 
				does not apply to the president's detention and interrogation of 
				enemy combatants." (From a 56-page memo, "Detainee 
				Interrogation in the Global War on Terrorism" written by a legal 
				team for the Secretary of Defense on the eve of the Iraq War.)
				 "Congress shall have 
				the power … to declare war and make rules concerning captures on 
				land and water … to define offenses against the law of nations 
				[and] to make rules for the government and regulation of the 
				land and naval forces." (From the Constitution, David G. 
				Savage and Richard B. Schmitt,
				
				Lawyers Ascribed Broad Power to Bush on Torture, the Los 
				Angeles Times)  "We need to have a 
				less-cramped view of what torture is and is not." (A 
				military official explaining the approach of the team writing 
				the above memo, Jess Bravin,
				
				Pentagon Report Set Framework For Use of Torture, The 
				Wall Street Journal)  "It's a very cowboy 
				kind of affair." (Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, who controlled 
				the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib 
				prison, speaking of the actions of the CIA unit there, R. 
				Jeffrey Smith,
				
				Soldier Described White House Interest, the Washington 
				Post)  Room 101
				 For his dystopia, 
				1984, his classic novel of totalitarianism, George Orwell 
				created "Room 101," an interrogation room where a prisoner's 
				deepest fears were to be realized and applied. Tier 1 in Iraq's 
				Abu Ghraib prison, as the now-infamous photos indicate, was the 
				Bush administration's Room 101 for the "Arab mind," and so the 
				crown jewel of its global interrogation facilities; just as 
				Guantanamo was the "crown jewel" of the prison camps in its 
				global Bermuda Triangle of injustice; just as the new appointed 
				"interim government" hidden within the ever-more fortified Green 
				Zone in Baghdad and led by a prime minister and former CIA asset 
				whose exile organization,
				
				we learned this week, once set off car bombs in downtown 
				Baghdad, is now the crown jewel of "freedom and democracy" in 
				the Middle East. This is our "war against terrorism." Talk about 
				an Orwellian world.  As it happens, from the 
				heart of Abu Ghraib's interrogation rooms and the acts of, as 
				our President and other administration officials have repeatedly 
				said, "a few people" or even
				"a few 
				hillbillies," the nature of, extent of, knowledge about, and 
				responsibility for such acts has been rapidly spreading outwards 
				across the imperium, upwards into the highest reaches of our 
				government, and backwards in time. We now know, for instance, 
				that, to the various acts of horror caught on camera in Abu 
				Graib, we must add murder (or rather numerous murders) in 
				Afghanistan as well as Iraq, and the use of electric shocks on 
				prisoners, as
				
				the Marine Corps Times reported recently.  As for the acts we saw 
				in the photographs, they too have "spread" and knowledge of them 
				reaches ever higher: To take but two examples,
				
				Nakedness is now reported to have been used as a tool of 
				humiliation not just in Iraq but in Afghanistan and at 
				Guantanamo, as it was used in one of the earliest acts of 
				American inhumanity in the war against terrorism, the 
				interrogation of John Walker Lindh in Afghanistan back in 2001; 
				while the "technique" of menacing prisoners with dogs -- "an 
				apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Army's 
				field manual" -- has now been well documented at Abu Ghraib
				
				by the Washington Post ("On Jan. 13, Spec. John Harold 
				Ketzer, a military intelligence interrogator, saw a dog team 
				corner two male prisoners against a wall, one prisoner hiding 
				behind the other and screaming, he later told investigators. 
				‘When I asked what was going on in the cell, the handler stated 
				that he was just scaring them, and that he and another of the 
				handlers was having a contest to see how many detainees they 
				could get to urinate on themselves…'"); but it was also 
				evidently employed at Guantanamo, according to the Wall 
				Street Journal.  In the meantime, 
				responsibility for such actions has moved inexorably upwards. We 
				know now that interest in information gleaned from 
				interrogations, ranging from that of John Walker Lindh
				
				to those in Iraq was requested at the highest official 
				levels (not so surprising, since our offshore mini-gulag was a 
				pet project of top officials in this administration): "The head 
				of the interrogation center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq 
				told an Army investigator in February that he understood some of 
				the information being collected from prisoners there had been 
				requested by ‘White House staff,' according to an account of his 
				statement obtained by The Washington Post." Far more 
				specifically,
				
				R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White of the Post reported this 
				Saturday that, despite his denials to Congress, in the fall of 
				2003, "Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military 
				officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure 
				interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in 
				Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a 
				Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed 
				sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and 
				water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly 
				obtained documents."  In turn, thanks to
				
				Jess Bravin and Greg Jaffe of the Wall Street Journal, we 
				now know that in December 2002 Donald Rumsfeld approved a very 
				similar list of "interrogation techniques" right down to those 
				dogs for Guantanamo: "U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo 
				Bay, Cuba, could put prisoners in ‘stress positions' for as long 
				as four hours, hood them and subject them to 20-hour-long 
				interrogations, ‘fear of dogs' and ‘mild non-injurious physical 
				contact,' according to [a] list of techniques Defense Secretary 
				Donald Rumsfeld approved in December 2002." (The list was later 
				rejiggered not because of any qualms Rumsfeld had but due to 
				complaints from military officers about the severity of the 
				methods suggested. The present list of approved techniques 
				remains classified, but will undoubtedly soon be leaked to the 
				press.)  The above can be traced 
				back farther yet. According to "documents, read to The [Los 
				Angeles] Times by two sources critical of how the government 
				handled the Lindh case,"
				
				writes journalist Richard Serrano, "After American Taliban 
				recruit John Walker Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, the 
				office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instructed 
				military intelligence officers to ‘take the gloves off' in 
				interrogating him… In the early stages, his responses were 
				cabled to Washington hourly, the new documents show… What 
				happened to Lindh, who was stripped and humiliated by his 
				captors, foreshadowed the type of abuse documented in 
				photographs of American soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners at 
				Abu Ghraib."  This, of course, takes 
				us not only to the top of the administration, but back to the 
				brink of the -- if I dare put it this way -- Ur-moment in the 
				setting up of what would become our offshore mini-gulag, those 
				months right after the 9/11 attacks when the Bush administration 
				began to set their system in place on the fly and,
				
				as Suzanne Goldenberg of the British Guardian reported 
				recently, on key issues without initially even consulting White 
				House or Pentagon lawyers.  
					"In one instance, 
					President George Bush's military order of November 13 2001, 
					which denies prisoner-of-war status to captives from 
					Afghanistan and allows their detention without charge or 
					access to a lawyer at Guantánamo, was issued without any 
					consultations with Pentagon lawyers, a former Pentagon 
					official said… The military order issued by Mr Bush in 
					November 2001 was the first such directive since the second 
					world war, and the administration's failure to seek the 
					Pentagon's advice on what would emerge as the entire system 
					of detention at Guantánamo surprised Pentagon officials." Add it all up -- only 
				what's been revealed so far -- and you have a global system 
				of injustice and torture, purposely mounted in the moral and 
				legal darkness, beyond the reach or oversight of anyone but the 
				President, vice-president, secretary of defense and associated 
				officials, meant to extract information (and take revenge), 
				meant as in Kafka's fictional penal colony to write the sentence 
				these men had passed on the bodies of America's captives. 
				 And talk about paper 
				trails! If you need any evidence of the combination of 
				arrogance, incompetence, and plain stupidity of the Bush 
				administration, it now sits unavoidably before our eyes. Didn't 
				they know anything about deniability? Didn't they know that you 
				can get so much done without committing anything to paper? 
				Didn't they know that you can signal what you want from the top 
				without issuing orders, making direct demands, or demanding 
				supporting opinions on paper?  Note two things here: 
				That almost all of the above, this whole little global shop of 
				horrors, is already documented -- quite literally in 
				papers pouring out of the bowels of this administration. These 
				documents are leaking daily from an administration that seems to 
				have split open along many angry rift lines. The
				
				British Telegraph this week, writing of the leaking of a 
				legal document on torture to the Wall Street Journal 
				commented, for example:  
					"The leak appears to 
					be part of an extraordinary civil war in the Pentagon 
					between civilian officials and uniformed officers appalled 
					by what they have described as moves by political appointees 
					to shroud the war on terrorism in an ‘environment of legal 
					ambiguity'." Some in the military, 
				the intelligence community, the State Department, administration 
				legal offices, and possibly even the Justice Department opposed 
				the creation of our mini-gulag and the kinds of interrogations 
				and conditions planned for it; some simply feared what the 
				illegality might do to them or their careers, including 
				evidently
				
				Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers who 
				fretted that he might become "a target for prosecution under 
				laws governing prisoner treatment"; some are undoubtedly 
				settling scores; others protecting tattered reputations; but 
				it's now close to open season on the administration from within.
				 Only today,
				
				the Los Angeles Times reported that, in a nearly 
				unprecedented act in our country, 26 ex-military and senior 
				diplomatic officials, "several appointed to key positions by 
				Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plan 
				to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President 
				George W. Bush has damaged America's national security and 
				should be defeated in November." And retired officials almost 
				invariably are speaking for larger constituencies within the 
				government -- all those potential leakers and mutterers -- who 
				fear speaking out publicly themselves.  
				
				Addressing an Asian security conference 
				on the administration's "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld 
				recently commented : "[T]he reality is that today we remain 
				closer to the beginning of this struggle than to its end." The 
				same might be said of the uncovering of responsibility for our 
				own global terror system. There will be so much more to learn. 
				Already, when it comes to Abu Ghraib, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the 
				Pentagon keeps heaping investigations on top of one another, 
				each subsequent one led by a figure with a higher rank and so 
				more capable of investigating responsibility at higher levels, 
				and I think it can be said with certainty that this will only 
				get worse -- worse probably than anything we now imagine. After 
				all, to take but the smallest of examples,
				
				CBS news reports that "of the 20 U.S.-run jails in 
				[Afghanistan], the Red Cross has only been allowed to visit one 
				in Kabul. Now one in Kandahar is being opened." Imagine what's 
				been happening at those other 18.  A world of 
				tortured definitions 
				 Here's what's clear. In 
				the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the "tough guys" of Bush's world 
				promptly battened down the hatches and began preparing for the 
				war, and warfare state, of their dreams. Using the analogy of 
				the almost four-decade-long Cold War, which was their lifetime 
				experience (and with movie images of World War II dancing in 
				their heads), they announced that we were in a global war not 
				against any state (though they were already itching to hit 
				Saddam's Iraq), but against "terrorism" itself, an amorphous 
				force -- actually, of course, a tactic employed by scattered 
				bands of Islamic fanatics (some initially funded by men in this 
				administration back when we were fighting the Soviets by proxy 
				in Afghanistan). This new "war," they announced with a certain 
				élan and self-satisfaction would, like the previous cold one, 
				last decades if not a lifetime. With Americans in shock and 
				fearful, they then began planning a no-holds-barred, bring-‘em-on 
				style of warfare filled with acts of pitiless, unilateral 
				vengeance to be launched by the most powerful state on the 
				planet in the way of which nothing should get.  This was a war to be 
				fought, to use a common Cold War catchphrase, "in the shadows," 
				and the shadows would soon enough include a global imprisonment 
				system that stretched from holding cells on aircraft carriers to 
				facilities in Afghanistan to Saddam's old prisons to Guantanamo 
				to military brigs in the United States and unnamed jails in 
				"friendly" foreign countries. In those shadows, beyond the eyes 
				of anyone, they had every intention of employing the sort of 
				tactics that they imagined would break the back of terrorism. 
				These acts of "information extraction" would be torture -- 
				terror, that is -- by another name or no name at all. 
				 Looking back, it's 
				curious how much of this was a war of words, a redefinitional 
				journey involving linguistic and legalistic contortions of the 
				most remarkable sorts. The first of these contorted definitions 
				was of "war" itself. We did not actually declare war. After all, 
				who was war to be declared against? We were simply defined as 
				being "at war." And from this, a series of other definitions 
				followed. Perhaps the most important had to do with the people 
				captured in this "war."  It might seem apparent 
				that, having declared yourself at war, the people you thereafter 
				captured might indeed be prisoners of war. But this presented a 
				problem since the rights of POWs were so clearly defined 
				internationally in treaties signed by the U.S. government. So 
				the administration simply redefined those captured in this 
				redefined war as "unlawful combatants" or "illegal combatants." 
				This and other terms used for them came out of a new Devil's 
				dictionary; for once we had defined them thusly, they could then 
				enter our offshore world of imprisonment -- at least in the 
				minds of Bush administration officials – as the sorts of 
				captives to whom a whole new series of definitions could be 
				applied.  The third definitional 
				problem was where to hold these prisoners, so that the holding 
				itself (without charge or trial, potentially to eternity) could 
				not be challenged either by the prisoners themselves through any 
				legal representation or through the courts of our own country. 
				The administration needed a place where it could publicly 
				practice its new definitional privacy – and that turned out to 
				be our military base at Guantanamo, which was redefined for the 
				purposes of the moment as under "Cuban sovereignty," though this 
				was obviously a brazen fiction. But even this wasn't 
				satisfactory for them. Guantanamo, off-limits as it was, still 
				turned out to be far too "public" for what they planned to do to 
				their "highest value" captives and so, for them, they developed 
				a special, CIA-run system of imprisonment that stepped beyond 
				definition itself. As Human Rights Watch puts it in
				an invaluable 
				recent report on our global torture system:  
					"Among the most 
					disturbing cases, perhaps unprecedented in U.S. history, are 
					the detainees who have simply been ‘disappeared.' Perhaps 
					out of concern that Guantánamo will eventually be monitored 
					by the U.S. courts, certainly to ensure even greater 
					secrecy, the Bush administration does not appear to hold its 
					most sensitive and high-profile detainees there. Terrorism 
					suspects like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused architect of 
					the September 11 attacks, and Abu Zubaydah, a close aide of 
					Osama bin Laden, are detained by the United States instead 
					in ‘undisclosed locations,' presumably outside the United 
					States, with no access to the ICRC, no notification to 
					families, no oversight of any sort of their treatment, and 
					in most cases no acknowledgement that they are even being 
					held. Human Rights Watch has pieced together information on 
					13 such detainees, apprehended in places such as Pakistan, 
					Indonesia, Thailand, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates, 
					who have ‘disappeared' in U.S. custody." At the same time, the 
				administration was attempting to redefine presidential power in 
				such a way that the once normal Congressional and court checks 
				and balances of an American republic no longer applied. In his 
				power as commander-in-chief (again note that all other 
				redefinitions were based on the redefinition of "war"), the 
				President was, in various legal briefs meant for the highest 
				officials in this administration, pronounced to be beyond any 
				control by Congress or the courts in his acts. (See the initial 
				quote above.)  Finally, having 
				redefined the nature of war, the powers of the president, the 
				nature of captivity, and the places of imprisonment, it was the 
				most natural thing in the world to redefine "information 
				extraction" within such a system so that neither international 
				treaties like the Geneva Conventions, nor congressionally passed 
				laws, nor the Constitution itself was applicable to them. In 
				this sense, from the earliest days after the 9/11 attacks, the 
				Bush administration was focused on, above all else, setting up a 
				global torture system by another name.  Much of this has 
				recently become clearer as a series of internal documents 
				produced by White House, Pentagon, and Justice Department 
				lawyers have leaked out in recent weeks. To offer a Vietnam 
				analogy, you might say that in the Vietnam era, The Pentagon 
				Papers, that revelatory secret study ordered up by Secretary 
				of Defense Robert McNamara and slipped to the New York Times 
				by one brave whistleblower, Daniel Ellsberg, were the private, 
				confessional equivalent of liberal guilt over the war; in the 
				Bush era, these unbelievable lawyers' memos, some also ordered 
				up in the privacy of the administration by the present Secretary 
				of Defense, are the neocon equivalent of a (legalistic) guilty 
				conscience. They are, in some perverse fashion, deeply 
				confessional documents, and in the future, they will read that 
				way.  There were two parallel 
				struggles here: One was to establish the war they wanted to 
				fight and this they largely did before they turned to the 
				lawyers; the other was to clear the decks legally for it. This 
				week – even while Ronald Reagan ruled --
				
				Jess Bravin of the Wall Street Journal produced a 
				hard-hitting piece based on one of these leaked documents that 
				began a process not likely to go away soon. He led off: 
				 
					"Bush administration 
					lawyers contended last year that the president wasn't bound 
					by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who 
					might torture prisoners at his direction couldn't be 
					prosecuted by the Justice Department. The advice was part of 
					a classified report on interrogation methods prepared for 
					Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after commanders at 
					Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained in late 2002 that with 
					conventional methods they weren't getting enough information 
					from prisoners… at its core is an exceptional argument that 
					because nothing is more important than ‘obtaining 
					intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of 
					American citizens,' normal strictures on torture might not 
					apply. The president, despite domestic and international 
					laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as 
					commander in chief to approve almost any physical or 
					psychological actions during interrogation, up to and 
					including torture, the report argued." As Bravin reported:
				 
					"The report was 
					compiled by a working group appointed by the Defense 
					Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes II. Air 
					Force General Counsel Mary Walker headed the group, which 
					comprised top civilian and uniformed lawyers from each 
					military branch and consulted with the Justice Department, 
					the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency 
					and other intelligence agencies. It isn't known if President 
					Bush has ever seen the report. A military lawyer who helped 
					prepare the report said that political appointees heading 
					the working group sought to assign to the president 
					virtually unlimited authority on matters of torture -- to 
					assert ‘presidential power at its absolute apex.'" Though the report has 
				now been much quoted, it should be read in full. Its flavor can 
				hardly be grasped in tidbits. It may, in fact, be one of the 
				most tortured "legal" pieces ever written -- certainly ever 
				written in a democracy -- on the subject of redefining acts of 
				inhumanity and torture as something other than acts of 
				inhumanity and torture. (If your computer can handle pdf files, 
				you can click here to find 
				it.) In it, Orwell's "doublethink" meets the lawyers and judges 
				of Kafka's The Trial head on, revealing a dark landscape 
				of legalistic legerdemain.  The report had two main 
				purposes, as best I understand it -- to place presidential power 
				(in the form of the powers of the commander-in-chief to 
				prosecute war) outside any legal boundaries whatsoever, thus 
				removing from George Bush and his subordinates of any 
				responsibility for acts he may have ordered committed; and to 
				redefine torture so narrowly that it becomes the definitional 
				property of the torturer.  It's worth spending a 
				little time with some of this document just to get a feel for 
				it. The lawyer-authors, for instance, expend much effort acting 
				as if they were part of a panel for a new edition of some 
				dictionary ("The word 'profound' has a number of meanings, all 
				of which convey a significant depth. Webster's New International 
				Dictionary 1977 [2nd ed. 1935 defines profound as...]") and, 
				where necessary, they don't hesitate to take up the role of 
				psychiatrist either. "We likewise think," they write at one 
				point, considering what might disrupt "profoundly the senses or 
				personality" and so be considered torture, "that the onset of 
				obsessive-compulsive disorder behaviors would rise to this 
				level... Moreover, we think that pushing someone to the brink of 
				suicide [which could be evidenced by acts of self-mutilation], 
				would be a sufficient disruption of the personality to 
				constitute a 'profound disruption.'")  Their purpose in each 
				case is to narrow drastically some previous legal definition of 
				torture. They spend much time, for instance, considering how to 
				define various parts of the well-accepted phrase
				
				"severe physical or mental pain or suffering," always 
				emphasizing the word "severe" and then defining it in the most 
				severe possible way:  
					"In order to prove 
					'severe mental pain or suffering,' the statute requires 
					proof of 'prolonged mental harm' that was caused by or 
					resulted from one of four enumerated acts... [T]he 
					development of a mental disorder such as posttraumatic 
					stress disorder, which can last months or even years, or 
					even chronic depression... might satisfy the prolonged harm 
					requirement... [I]f a defendant [interrogator] has a good 
					faith belief that his actions will not result in prolonged 
					mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his 
					actions to constitute torture. A defendant could show that 
					he acted in good faith by taking such steps as surveying 
					professional literature, consulting with experts, or 
					reviewing evidence gained from past experience... Because 
					the presence of good faith would negate the specific intent 
					element of torture, good faith may be a complete defense to 
					such a charge." In other words, the 
				harm to a prisoner from what might ordinarily be considered acts 
				of inhumanity and torture must be "severe" indeed -- proof of 
				that severity could even take several months to develop -- and 
				in addition it would have to be proved that the interrogator 
				actually meant to create a state of, say, posttraumatic 
				stress disorder. In other words, the act of torture is not, in 
				fact, torture if the intent to torture is not there -- and, 
				since it's a matter of "good faith," the only person who could 
				affirm that torture had taken place would, in essence, be the 
				torturer.  But even that's not 
				enough. According to this administration's best legal minds, 
				even knowing in a general sense what ill results might come from 
				your acts does not necessarily make you a torturer, not if you 
				did not mean to cause such results. What must be proven 
				is "specific intent to cause pain," a phrase they then spend 
				much space redefining. They write:  
					"As a theoretical 
					matter, therefore, knowledge alone that a particular result 
					is certain to occur does not constitute specific intent... 
					if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the 
					requisite specific intent... A defendant is guilty of 
					torture only if he acts with the express purpose of 
					inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his 
					custody or physical control... Where a defendant acts in 
					good faith, he acts with an honest belief that he has not 
					engaged in the proscribed conduct." This is, of course, but 
				the briefest glimpse into the bizarre and twisted definitional 
				thinking that fills this 56-page document, much of it focused on 
				the problem of potential future "prosecutions arising out of the 
				exercise of the president's express authority as 
				Commander-in-Chief" to create what is essentially a torture 
				regime abroad. (Strangely enough, in the light of day this dark 
				document reads like a witness for the prosecution in any future 
				war-crimes-style trials of the members of this administration.) 
				Just to give a tiny flavor of this aspect of the document, 
				here's an almost random passage:  
					"Any effort by 
					Congress to regulate the interrogation of unlawful 
					combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of 
					the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President. There can 
					be little doubt that intelligence operations, such as the 
					detention and interrogation of enemy combatants and leaders, 
					are both necessary and proper for the effective conduct of a 
					military campaign. Indeed such operations may be of more 
					importance in a war with an international terrorist 
					organization than one with the conventional armed forces of 
					a nation-state, due to the former's emphasis on secret 
					operations and surprise attacks against civilians. It may be 
					the case that only successful interrogations can provide the 
					information necessary to prevent the success of covert 
					terrorist attacks upon the United States and its citizens. 
					Congress can no more interfere with the President's conduct 
					of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate 
					strategy or tactical decisions on the battlefield. Just as 
					statutes that order the President to conduct warfare in a 
					certain manner or for specific goals would be 
					unconstitutional, so too are laws that seek to prevent the 
					President from gaining the intelligence he believes 
					necessary to prevent attacks upon the United States." Finally, the authors of 
				this document invoke the "superior orders" doctrine (made famous 
				at Nuremberg) commenting that:  
					"In sum, the defense 
					of superior orders will generally be available for U.S. 
					Armed Forces personnel engaged in exceptional interrogations 
					except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently 
					unlawful." Of course, that 
				wonderfully turned phrase "exceptional interrogations" means 
				"torture" (except that, by this point in the document, torture 
				itself no longer means torture); and while I'm no lawyer, the 
				concept of "patently unlawful" seems a curious one to me. I'd 
				like to see that brought into an everyday court of law. (The 
				defendant throws himself on the mercy of the court: "I did it, 
				judge, and it was definitely unlawful, but I plead innocent 
				since it was not patently so.")  The Wall Street Journal 
				"opinion" is but
				
				one of a series of internal memorandums we now know about, 
				written between January 2002 and early this year, which seem to 
				have much in common. For instance, in an earlier legal 
				memorandum, written in August 2002 by the Justice Department for 
				the CIA, "signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee," 
				addressed to White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, and leaked
				
				to the Washington Post, the writers also chewed over the 
				issue of how much pain constitutes torture. They wrote that the 
				"inflicting [of] moderate or fleeting pain does not necessarily 
				constitute torture. Torture, the memo says, ‘must be equivalent 
				in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, 
				such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even 
				death.'" (Otherwise, assumedly, you just scream.) Similarly, the 
				writers suggest: "For purely mental pain or suffering to amount 
				to torture… it must result in significant psychological harm of 
				significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years."
				 Let's remember that of 
				the legal minds responsible for these "opinions,"
				
				Bybee is now a judge on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of 
				Appeals in San Francisco; the Defense Department's general 
				counsel, William J. Haynes II has been nominated to be an 
				appellate judge, in the U.S. 4th Circuit in Richmond, Va.; and 
				John Yoo, author of some of the earliest of these memorandum, 
				has returned to a professorship at the University of California, 
				Berkeley, where, in response to student protests,
				
				he said: "I think the calls for my resignation are misguided 
				and don't show an understanding of the job of a lawyer." 
				 And in this he's 
				probably right. As the CIA produced the kited "intelligence" the 
				administration needed to go to war in Iraq, so its various legal 
				groups produced the memorandum it needed – again and again and 
				again – to imprison beyond the rule of law and torture those 
				whom it pleased. As 
				Phillip Carter, a former U.S. Army officer, put it in Slate: 
				"[N]o amount of caveating can save the latest Defense Department 
				memorandum on the legality of torture… from being construed as 
				what it is: a cookbook on how to conduct illegal torture and get 
				away with it."  These are, in fact, 
				documents of shame, symbolic of a kind of bureaucratic 
				lawlessness let loose at the heart of our government. They are 
				intent on creating a pseudo-legal basis for replacing the rule 
				of law with the rule of a commander-in-chief.
				
				As Robert Kuttner put it in the Boston Globe, "For nearly 
				three years, the Bush administration has resorted to the most 
				preposterous fictions to define either locales or categories of 
				people to whom the law does not apply. If you connect the dots, 
				the torture at Abu Ghraib is part of a larger slide toward 
				tyranny as the Bush administration tries to exempt itself from 
				the rule of law." As justifications for torture, these are the 
				sorts of documents one can imagine finding in the files of some 
				grim third world dictatorship or maybe the former Apartheid 
				regime of South Africa.
				
				As the Washington Post editorial page put it recently, 
				speaking of the authors of such memos and their masters, "Theirs 
				is the logic of criminal regimes…" Were it ever to be made the 
				law of the land, our republic, such as it is, would quite 
				literally be ended and we would face some kind of one-party 
				dictatorship. Were its definitions of torture ever made the law 
				of the land, every torturer on earth would shout hosannas to it.
				 [Coming Tuesday, 
				Part II: On our global torture system, its history, future 
				presidential defenses, and the rise of the Nazi analogy…] 
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