Are you upset that Obama doesn't think he needs to prosecute torturers? So is this guy:
President Barack Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA interrogators who used waterboarding on terrorism suspects amounts to a breach of international law, the U.N. rapporteur on torture said.
"The United States, like all other states that are part of the U.N. convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court," U.N. special rapporteur Manfred Nowak told the Austrian daily Der Standard.
Yeah, well, every Joe Schmoe rapporteur on torture's got an opinion. But we should all just relax, because some people may actually end up in jail as a result of their involvement with torture!
Torture case lawyers may face jail for letter
A former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who accused a Bay Area company of flying him to foreign torture chambers for the CIA is at the center of a bizarre new case, in which his lawyers face possible jail sentences for writing a letter that asked President Obama to disclose how brutally he was treated.
The government says the letter falsely accused a Pentagon review team of censoring details of the alleged torture of Binyam Mohamed from a document the attorneys wanted to send to Obama. The lawyers stand by their accusations but have been summoned to Washington, D.C., by a federal judge for a hearing next month on whether they should be held in contempt of court, punishable by up to six months in jail.
No word yet from Attorney General Eric "you should never put bananas in the refrigerator" Holder on whether or not the government would provide legal representation to Mohamed's lawyers, at no cost to them, in any state or federal judicial or administrative proceeding brought against them based on torture-related conduct and would take measures to respond to any proceeding initiated against them in any international or foreign tribunal, including appointing counsel to act on their behalf and asserting any available immunities and other defenses in the proceeding itself. Nor whether, to the extent permissible under federal law, the government will also indemnify them for any monetary judgment or penalty ultimately imposed against them for such conduct and will provide representation in congressional investigations. But I'm sure it's just a matter of time.
(More hijinks with Eric "any way you want to eat them, it's impossible to beat them" Holder here and here.)
There's a name for this complying-with-treaties-that-we-ourselves-have-ratified, it's called "transnationalism," and Rick Santorum doesn't like it one bit.
Posted by: SteveB | Monday, April 20, 2009 at 12:13 PM