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Center for Constitutional Rights President: Coverup of Anti-Torture Memo Is Bad News for Bushies
I just got off the phone with Columbia Law School professor Michael Ratner, who is also the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a human rights nonprofit. Ratner read our story this morning about Philip Zelikow's allegations that Dick Cheney's office may have "collected and destroyed" an anti-torture memo Zelikow wrote in 2005. Any such coverup could present a significant problem for the defense in any potential torture trial targeting Bush administration officials, Ratner says:
If this memo's out there, an important part of it goes towards mens rea, which is a guilty mind. A lot of the question here is did they know [torture] was wrong, did they know it was criminal. If they suppressed opposite opinions, that's some indication that they had guilty minds. If there were memos that were intentionally suppressed, it would be one of the elements that go towards a conviction.
Ratner says that if Zelikow's anti-torture memo was suppressed, it probably wasn't just because Bush White House bureaucrats wanted to ignore opinions they disagreed with:
I think they wanted a clean slate so they could later say that our legal conclusions were reasonable and they were made in good faith. [A coverup] undercuts that... It undercuts the lawyers' defense that this was in good faith and objectively reasonable and it also puts out there that there's an alternative view of the legality of [torture].
It remains unclear what actually happened. Ratner says the smart legal move would probably have been to ignore Zelikow's memo rather than trying and failing to suppress it, Ratner says: "The suppression of it stings more because it indicates that they didn't want to know."
More on this as it develops.
Anti-Torture Memo
The guy that wrote the memo was on the Rachel Maddow show not too long ago and said he still had a copy of the memo.
yep, he sure did
It's true, I saw it with my own eyes.
Maddow's Zelikow Interview
Worth the time:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/#30335366
Mens Rea
tagged as:- solution
Ratner is right. Practically everything Cheney or his minions did betrays a deep consciousness of guilt that should weigh heavily against them IF this ever gets to court.
My fear is that Obama will pull a Ford and pardon the whole stinking lot of them, just to get this off the national agenda.
But covering up a wound instead of cleaning it out causes infection. We wouldn't have these problems now if Nixon and his ilk had been prosecuted back then. Instead, based on what happened with Nixon, Cheney and Bush were confident that anything they or their henchmen* did would be pardoned down the road -- rather than put the country through what Gerald Ford called a "long national nightmare."
No. This would be our long WAKING from a nightmare. We need testimony, under oath, in open court, on camera. And no pretense that it needs to be kept secret so 'the enemy" won't know how we torture. News flash: the people we tortured already know exactly how we did it. The only people who don't know... are us, the American citizens who funded it. We're entitled to see what we paid for.
*Okay, Condoleeza Rice would be a henchwoman.
thnks for your post. it's
thnks for your post. it's wonderful.....
If they were worried enough
If they were worried enough to get rid of memos, who says they weren't worried enough to ask the CIA to change reports about what it had said to members of Congress before torturing?