"I was only exceeding orders"

[nancylebov]

I still need to do a big post about torture, but meanwhile, I kept thinking "All that stuff in the memos is torture, it really is, but what makes anyone think people limited themselves to what was in the orders?", and people got angry at Obama for letting torturers off the hook and other people said "Maybe Obama is playing a long game", and then I heard one more time that anyone who followed the orders wouldn't be prosecuted, and it occurred to me that if all the records come out, there just might be a lot of prosecutions.

Mind you, this wouldn't be good enough-- what the memos describe is torture-- but it would be something.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

It has occurred to me that the CIA has a lot of information on people, and perhaps especially a lot of information on people in high public office, and that this may be a reason they've "convinced" Obama not to prosecute. More likely it's just politics as usual, but I can't completely discount this.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I've wondered similar things about Republican party discipline.

[milimod.livejournal.com]

Yeah, those were my thoughts when listening to the news reports. I worked in a psychiatric hospital for awhile, typing the instructions for restraint and other such procedures. Reading it, you get a mental picture of level-headed, compassionate nurses and orderlies who never take their jobs personally. Watch them for a couple of days and you find out differently. The same has to be true of people who work at Guantanamo. People are not machines, and manuals don't prevent human foibles such as anger, vindictiveness or just plain meanness. And what exactly is the distinction between "tough" and "mean?"

[kugelblitz.livejournal.com]

The NYT article

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22detain.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

Essentially the interrogation folks said, "We are done" and the suits disagreed. So the REMFs insisted on going to stupid lengths for no result. Penalizing the interrogators is pointless, the people who insisted on using techniques that were known to fail are the ones who need to be standing in front of a jury.