The Sunshine Empire

With the Obama administration’s release of the memos from OLC proving that the Bush administration tortured terror suspects, many in the political punditry class have begun screaming for blood. Jay Bybee and John Yoo took this country’s good name as a shining city on a hill and drug it through the same mud that only communist Cold War dictators and the enemies of freedom had tread. Now the President has said that he was against prosecuting those CIA interrogators that were relying on these legal memos for guidance. Now as much as any ethical American would have quit rather than engage in torturing another human being, I agree that they were relying on faulty information during a time of intense political pressure from the Executive branch.

Those higher up are not in the same league as far as anyone should be concerned. There is no doubt that Judge Bybee and Professor Yoo were told to provide cover for these actions, not simply asked to find out what the parameters where. They were also tasked with creating a regime that could allow for the creation of a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq as a pretext for the invasion of the latter. Now many political commentators have spoken of the need to prosecute Yoo and Bybee and to impeach Bybee from the Federal bench. Now Obama has been noncommittal in terms of whether legal action would be taken against those in the OLC that rubber stamped torture, and many have begun to criticize him from the left for this, and Senators have danced around the subject. I thought it was needed myself until I spoke with TSE’s chief legal adviser.

Lawyers are rarely prosecuted for simply giving legal advice if it is given in good faith. Good faith is the key and to prove otherwise you need to prove intent. Proving intent in such a case would be next to impossible. Some may feel that their actions were reprehensible and the domain of the unoriginal and cowardly, but every situation is not like Law and Order where the bad guys always lose. No matter the amount of circumstantial evidence the two would be next to impossible to prosecute or impeach in the case of Bybee. But the two will have to live with the fact that they single handedly debased and soiled the reputation of the greatest nation on earth. They also can never leave the country because someone will arrest them for war crimes.