Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

Three important things from the news:

1. The Washington Post has posted the full text of the DoJ memo suggesting how torture of detainees abroad “may be justified,” along with some related memoranda and transcripts of recent press conferences and senate hearings of interest. All very interesting reads.
2. Next Monday, at 0630 PDT, the SpaceShipOne will attempt to become the first private manned spacecraft. It looks like it will probably work. (Knock on wood!) This is very possibly the coolest single thing on the planet at this time.
3. And on a related note, on July 1st, the Cassini-Huygens probe is scheduled for orbit insertion around Saturn. Its route will take it straight through the rings, going through the F-G gap, then up close by the planet (snapping pictures all the time) and into an elliptical orbit. This is going to be extremely neat.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Some “administration lawyers,” to be none to specific, apparently opined in a March 2003 confidential memo that the President is bound neither by international treaties nor federal laws regarding torture, and that any such prohibition “must be construed as inapplicable to interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority.” (News story)

Phrased another way, torture is permissible so long as it’s for interrogation purposes and done for ultimately military purposes.

Or to highlight the obvious inference, the president is above all laws, federal, state, or international treaties, so long as he argues that his actions are in some way, shape or form pursuant to his duty as CiC of the armed forces.

Apparently this wasn’t a sole memo – there was a chain of them, largely prepared for Rumsfeld, used to justify activities first at Guantánamo, then in Afghanistan, and finally in Iraq. Much of its basis was an earlier memo (22 Jan 2002) from the Justice Department on arguments to keep American officials from being charged with war crimes.

Where the hell does our administration find these people? And have they lost their minds completely? Are they completely unaware of what happens when a leader or a military places itself above the law, above the Constitution, and above civil society?

(And let me state, for the record: I believe that commanders need a great deal of flexibility to deal with situations in war, especially nonconventional war. But decisions such as the use of torture cannot be unilateral and immune to judicial and legal review, and the President cannot demand blanket exemption from American law for any reason whatsoever.)

On 4 Feb, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force got a judge to issue a subpoena to Drake University in Iowa for all records associated with an anti-war protest held there on 15 Nov. (story, stora) The subpoena, issued under seal by US District Judge Longstaff, includes specific requests for all records regarding the protest leaders.

According to attornies from the National Lawyer’s Guild and the ACLU, this is the first such subpoena in several decades. (As a side note: These subpoenas were especially common during the 1960s, and were a particular favorite even before then of J. Edgar Hoover. Their primary purpose then was to assemble dossiers against political subversives and enemies of various administrations.)

The seriousness of this matter is, I hope, clear. The issuing of subpoenas of any sort, even for purely “informational purposes,” against demonstrators is designed and intended to have a chilling effect on speech; it is a specific act of the Justice Department to subdue ordinary political dissent. The subpoena has been challenged in court and hopefully will not stand.

In another matter, there was this story about investigations within the DoD. I can’t even begin to explain how furious this makes me. If any of these allegations are substantiated, these are matters for general courts-martial and the penalties which only they can provide; it brings into question the performance of the entire chain of command in any place where it happened, and of who allowed a circumstance to arise in which such a thing could even be conceivable. I only hope that all levels involved in this understand just how serious a matter this is.