Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Liz Cheney: A Primer in Invalid Argumentation

[ Minion, I'll spell check after I get to work, so don't bother pointing out my errors and typos.]

Oh, Morning Joe, if all the world be a stage then those who play at vacuous spew use Moring Joe as their green room. Liz Cheney this morning is continuing her media tour promoting the patriotic heroism of her father. Here's a stripped down summary of her talking points:

So it's just a difference of oppinion. I mean, intellegent men can disagree, and this is just one of those times. Sure torture is illegal, but that's the thing, see water boarding is not torture.

So that's part one of Liz's by proxy defence of her super villain father, that the act we are debating simply does not qualify as torture and therefore as not illegal.

Part two, the OLC wrote legal opinions telling us that these techniques that the intellegence community desperately wanted to use were perfectly legal.

Also, it worked. These "techniques" (which is a word Obama has chosen to use to describe these acts) produced "actionable intellegence".

That's part three, that by doing these things attacks on America were stopped.

Further, what would you do if you thought an attack on your wife and children was eminant? Wouldnt you use every technique at your disposal to stop that from happening?

That's part four that after 9 Eleven, we thought another attack was iminant and that we made the decision to use every technique at our disposal to keep another attack from happening.

Let's just go through this real quick. This is a pretty easy debunk:

Part 1: Waterboarding, the subject "technique" was illegal when the United States prosecuted Japanese soldiers in WWII, and US soldiers during Viet Nam. So there is a precedential chain that establishes the illegality of waterboarding. Further there are no, not one, case of the aquital of someone chaged with waterboarding who has been found not guilty of torture. To be precise, not everyone accused and found guilty of a crime is guilty of a crime, but everyone found guilty of waterboarding is not guilty of waterboarding they are guilty of torture and a war crime. It was torture during the spanish inquisition, it was torture during WWII, during the reign of Pinochet, and during the race wars in the Balkins. It is decided law.

Part 2: The memos were recinded. They were recinded by subsequent Bush administration OLC lawyers and not because a policy had shifted but because they were irresponsible and a poor excuse for legal opining. Further, that as Eugene Robinson argued, if the standard for legality is a memo from a lawyer, and that that opinion is only invalid if it can be proved the opinion was a departure from the lawyers genuine understanding of the law, then I am 1) proposing that I may rob banks with impunity, and that I have this right because of a very important but subtle component of Texas community property rights, that I won't go into now and 2) I'm going to law school 3) I'm going to start writing memos.

Part 3: The more information we get our hands on, the more memos that are released, the more we believe this to be false. It is becoming clear that we got all the information we needed from FBI interogators before the CIA started with torture. We also know that torture victims will say anything to make the torture stop. If this is not the case I'm suggesting we extradite Senator John McCain to Viet Nam to stand trial for the war crims he claimed to committ while a prisoner there in the sixties and seventies.

Part 4: This is the ultimate Republican judo look at the shiny thing technique. Judo because it takes their own cowardice in the face of crisis and attempts to apply it to the democrats who they believe are to cowardly to break the law or to "do what it takes". It's the shiny thing in the same way that the nuclear smoking gun meme was so powerful. Really though, how do you know another attack is eminant? What are the grounds by which we come to this conclussion? And what is eminant? Is eminant by 9/21? Is eminant by 9/11/02? How long can a terrorist be in custody and still be in possesion of intellegence on eminant attacks? A week? A month?

One last point, the right thing to do would be to find every single individual who had a hand in facilitating torture and prosocute them. We can prosecute Nancy Pelosi AND Dick Cheney now, in American courts, have the investigations and the trials right now under our control, or they can happen 10 years from now in Germany, or Spain or Holland. There will be accountability on the democratic and republican sides, and the choice we have is weather we want to control that acountability or leave it to someone else.

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