PJR on-line

The 3rd quarter issue of The Public Justice Report is now on-line. Some will likely find of interest the following disturbing article by James W. Skillen: "It Could Never Happen Here: Abuse of Prisoners and the Rule of Law." An excerpt:

Commentator Stuart Taylor Jr., who has been broadly supportive of the Bush administration, writes with dismay about that March 6, 2003 report that was written by Pentagon lawyers for Rumsfeld, who wanted to know how far the military could go in interrogating prisoners without being faulted even under American law for mistreating or torturing them. "Most breathtaking," says Taylor, is the following claim made on pages 20-21 of the leaked, 56-page report: "In light of the president's complete authority over the conduct of war,... the prohibition against torture [in the 1994 criminal statute] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority" (Taylor, "The Torture Memos: Putting the President Above the Law," National Journal, 6/12/04).

That Pentagon report, says Taylor, was "prepared under the watchful eyes of the White House" and "built on an August 2002 Justice Department memo addressed to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, in response to a CIA request for legal protection for interrogators."

What is clear as well as outrageous about these legal opinions is that the mistreatment, even torture, of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was not the consequence of a "few bad apples" at the bottom of the military ranks, as the president claims, or the distorted ideas of one or two secretive military lawyers who got carried away with themselves. No, says Taylor, these "warped analyses…reflect an attitude deeply entrenched in the Bush White House--including Bush and Dick Cheney as well as Gonzales--that whenever the president invokes national security, he enjoys near-dictatorial powers and is quite literally above the law."

I might add perhaps that Skillen himself was cautiously optimistic about a Bush presidency four years ago, since, in his judgement, Bush knew "he has to learn from others and not rush to judgment" and looked "like the one most likely to mature further as he works with others." So this new article does not come from someone who habitually reviles Bush in knee-jerk fashion.