Torture and Law Breaking

[catzmeow]

How the "enhanced interrogation techniques" should have been handled, legally speaking, based upon American historical tradition and law:

If the president believed that following the law at that point would lead to the imminent deaths of thousands of people, then his constitutional responsibility was either to urge the Congress to repeal the Geneva Conventions and UN Convention, or to break the law because this one moment necessitated it and then present himself for trial. That's the Lincoln model. What Bush did instead was secretly break the law, invoke a constitutional theory that the executive can always break such laws in the furtherance of national security and order his lawyers to provide specious reasons why he had not done so. Then he lied about it repeatedly in public.

Then when photographs from Abu Ghraib showed in graphic detail the horrifying reality of much milder techniques than the ones he had explicitly authorized, he blamed low-level soldiers and allowed them to take the fall. Then, over a year after Abu Ghraib and four years after 9/11, he set up an elaborate, ongoing program to torture prisoners, replete with lawyers, doctors, professional torturers, and psychologists. Then, when the International Committee of the Red Cross gave him a report detailing what it described as unequivocal torture, he shelved it, further violating his core responsibility to enforce the law.

This is an ongoing, premeditated conspiracy to systematically break the law and violate treaty obligations.

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

The idea that the Bush administration approved these tactics, and then let soldiers take the fall for using them...doesn't that cause ANYONE any heartburn here?