Trust Us

Interesting....

You know, i'd forgotten about the timing here. The Abu Ghraib story appeared just hours after the Bush Administration Department of Justice appeared before the US Supreme Court. There, they claimed that the US does not torture prisoners. This not only casts into view the full ramifications of their drunken tear through constitutional rights, but it also brings up another zinger (scandal?).

If this was going on (particularly in Gitmo, as is being reported), did the Bush Administration lie to the supreme court? this is pretty serious stuff.

From the Article:

a Justice Department attorney representing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared before the Supreme Court to argue that the Bush administration is free to imprison a U.S. citizen for as long as it likes -- without a lawyer, without a hearing, without any contact with the outside world -- based solely on the president's determination that the citizen is an "enemy combatant" in the war on terror.

When skeptical justices asked about the risk that a detainee might be abused while in custody, Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement told them they must "trust the executive to make the kind of quintessential military judgments that are involved in things like that." The government's interrogators understand that information obtained through coercion may be unreliable, Clement said, and they know that "the last thing you want to do is torture somebody or try to do something along those lines."

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that some governments engage in "mild torture" to obtain information, Clement shot back: "Well, our executive doesn't."


*AHEM*