Investigations galore

[Notice: Light posting until July 12 or so.]  I will be posting some.  But I figure I should preface the posts with a notice so people won't figure I've disappeared into the gulag.  Or become mesmerized by Fox News.

Bob Dreyfuss has a good post about Investigation Summer 06/15/04.  There are major investigations under way.  And, at best, none of them are likely to look particularly good for the Bush administration.

As Dreyfuss summarizes:

There are several investigations of U.S. intelligence in connection with Iraq, the 9/11 commission is finishing its work, the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame investigation is proceeding, there are several panels looking at the Abu Ghraib scandal, investigators are examining who leaked what to Ahmed Chalabi, there is Halliburton dirt to be revealed and more. In normal times, any one of these would be enough to knock the pins out from under a president, but taken together it’s a blitzkrieg.

The magnitude of the torture revelations is still sinking in for our sad excuse for a political press corps.  While they pursued their favorite trivial pursuits, and passed on the administration's false claims of Iraqi WMDs, the Bush gang was building a gulag based on the premise that the president could set aside any law, any treaty, any provision of the Constitution, as long as he claimed it was in pursuit of some national security objective.  They set up an elaborate torture network - a criminal network - under that cover.  The Los Angeles Times reported on the experience of Sean Baker, a US soldier who found himself a victim of the Bush gang's torture policy (I've referred to this case before):

Ex-Soldier Recalls Beating He Received in Guantanamo Drill Los Angeles Times 06/15/04

Baker was the guy who was ordered to pose as an uncooperative witness in Guantanamo and who still suffers seizures from the vicious beating he received from his fellow soldiers, all of whom were breaking the law and violating their duty as US soldiers by engaging in the action they did.  Unfortunately, the Bush torture policy has a lot of accomplices:

Lt. Col. Jim Marshall, a spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, said that an internal investigation in February 2003 concluded that no one was liable for Baker's injuries and there was no need for a criminal inquiry. Another spokeswoman, Maj. Laurie Arellano, said the investigation concluded that Baker's injuries were a "foreseeable consequence" of the drill.

Marshall said procedures had been reviewed to prevent future injuries. "While it is unfortunate that Spc. Baker was injured, the standards of professionalism we expect of our soldiers mandate that our training be as a realistic as possible," he said.

Members of immediate response forces are "handpicked based on maturity, common sense and judgment," Marshall said, adding that they were trained to use the minimum force necessary.

Anne Applebaum notes that the cowardice and lack of responsiblity in Congress that allowed the Iraq War to occur and the torture gulag to be set up despite the warnings they had is unfortunately continuing: So Torture Is Legal? Washington Post 06/16/04.  And not only in Congress:

As I say, connect the dots: They lead from the White House to the Pentagon to Abu Ghraib, and from Abu Ghraib back to military intelligence and thus to the Pentagon and the White House. They don't, it is true, make a complete picture. They don't actually reveal whether direct White House and Pentagon orders set off a chain of events leading to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, prisoner deaths in Afghanistan or other uses of torture we haven't learned about yet.

But who will fill in the blanks? Here is the tragedy: Despite the easy availability of evidence, almost nobody has an interest in pushing the investigation as far as it should go.

Clearly the administration will not ever, of its own volition, tell us what the White House knew and when the White House knew it: There's an election coming up. As if to underline this point, the president ducked and dodged last week when asked at a news conference about torture, declaring that "the instructions went out to our people to adhere to the law." But which law? The Geneva Conventions? Or the law as defined by secret memos?

Will the military itself pursue the investigation honestly?  The same military that sends pathetic characters like Lt. Col. Jim Marshall and Maj. Laurie Arellano (see above) out to justify the criminal torture of one of their own fellow soldiers?

Molly Ivins, at least, isn't afflicted with the timidity that affects the Big Pundits: How Comforting 06/15/04.

How comforting to know the Department of Justice memo on the subject of torture advises it "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impaired bodily function or even death." (Memo available on washingtonpost.com.) Just beating the living crap out of someone doesn't count at all. The Geneva Conventions are not binding on us, nor are any other international agreements if it impedes the war effort, says the DOJ. ... Under the DOJ theory of the Constitution, the president can not only approve torture, he can also approve genocide.

Michael Froomkin's much-quoted analysis can be found here: OLC's Aug. 1, 2002 Torture Memo ("the Bybee Memo") 06/14/04.  (In a later post, he notes that in the elision above in Ivins' column, she technically misquotes his 06/04 post.)  In another post, Froomkin also takes on the sophomore-philosophy class argument that justifies torture as an emergency measure: The 'Terrorist With an A-bomb' Torture Scenario 06/16/04.