A bizarre Bush defense from Peter Berkowitz

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, GMU law professor Peter Berkowitz offers this paragraph as part of his argument for why it is wrong to hate President Bush:

And lord knows the Bush administration has blundered in its handling of legal issues that have arisen in the war on terror. But from the common progressive denunciations you would never know that the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal. And you could easily overlook that in our system of government the executive branch, which has principal responsibility for defending the nation, is in wartime bound to overreach--especially when it confronts on a daily basis intelligence reports that describe terrifying threats--but that when checked by the Supreme Court the Bush administration has, in accordance with the system, promptly complied with the law.

Note how shallow these substantive points are. First, Berkowitz writes that "the Bush administration has rejected torture as illegal," but fails to explain that it has endorsed the use of several techniques that are commonly viewed as torture. Then he congratulates the White House for complying with Supreme Court decisions, which I didn't realize was an action worthy of praise. Things must be worse than I thought if this is the best defense a conservative law professor can muster.

Comments

[The Objective Historian]

Hello?

At any time, Congress can pass a law defining waterboarding as torture adn making it illegal; I am not aware of the legislation even being proposed (although I imagine someone must have done so). Someone wrote a great few sentences communicating how absurd the waterboarding controversy is; in not-particularly-imminent defense of our nation we nuclear bombed/fire-bombed hundreds of millions of CHILDREN in World War II (German and Japanese cities). Why would we not subject a very few particularly selected TERRORISTS (not POWs) to similated drowning if it proved to provide information about a dirty nuclear weapon?

I'd encourage any who read this not to be fanatics when it comes to defending our children from "dirty-fighters" bringing "dirty-weapons" (nuclear, biological, chemical) into our HOME.

Lastly, there is a spectrum; interrogation, interrogation under non-permanent-injury duress (sleep deprivation, sodium pentathol, waterboarding), interrogation under torture (screwdriver-fingernails); for the sake of our children, let's call waterboarding interrogation under duress .... huh? And stop obsessing on the waterboarding of terrorists who kill our children and then hide amongst their own.

TOH

[The Objective Historian]

Follow up:

I meant hundreds of thousands of children.

Also, the point, to iterate, is that tacitly, waterboarding has bipartisan approval; it's just that the Democrats would like to make it exclusively a Bush/Cheney policy. If Bill Clinton were president still, his CIA would be doing the same thing.

TOH

[The Objective Historian]

BANG!

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2007/11/019025.php

This Powerline post sums it up; Congress' job is tell Bush/Cheney/Mukasey what is torture not Bush/Cheney/Mukasey's job to tell Congress or to endanger US lives erring on the side of being too lenient - again - to non-POW illegitimate mass murdering civilian children killers who ARE SUB-HUMAN.

By the way, the rest of this article was a slap-down of all the absurd reasons for hating Bush; once leftists leave their cozy circles they find out that all of their conclusions are just silly. It was not Bush who stole the election; Gore tried to steal it and was stopped by the US Constitution and it's derivative laws as interpreted by the Supreme Cout, i.e., The Law; the same Court that legitimizes abortion. And Bush did not deceive us into War; Hussein defied us into it - Republicans and Democrats (Clinton, Kerry, Edwards) whose tough talk at the time was perfectly in pitch with Bush. And, where is the Clinton/Obama anti-waterboarding legislation (actually what legislation have they ever proposed - ever!).

TOH

[Sean-B]

1. Bush did steal the election. It's Florida law to count every vote. Gore only tried to steal the election. Obviously, he failed.

2. Bush deceived us into war whether or not Hussein defied us into it.

3. If you trust the government to torture who think they are terrorists, including any future administrations yet to be appointed/elected, more power to you. The Ruby Ridgers sure have done a 360, I tell ya.

[MD]

The reason why sensible people are upset about waterboarding is not because of some fictitious scenario of Jack Bauer getting info to stop a ticking dirty bomb about to kill a busload of kittens and puppies in downtown LA but for the far greater likelihood that innocent folks get waterboarded for information they dont have. The US govt itself acknowledges the majority of people it is holding in Cuba have no intelligence value. Dismissing the problem of innocent non terrorists being caught up in the same net and treated the same way means washing your hands of any moral authority or superiority the United States.

[JFred]

"complying with Supreme Court decisions" is ALWAYS worthy of praise, just in case.

Frank Rich, for example, in today's column, pretty much accuses Bush of overthrowing the constitution. This foolish talk should stop. There are plenty of things to criticize Bush for, without make the mistakes that Rich makes. The conservative professor was right to point this out.

[Sean-B]

Back to Berkowitz, it's funny he uses the "in times of war" phrase to gauge executive branch actions. Yet the Bush administration has changed the definition of war to include a "a war on terror", i.e., a non-defined open-ended ongoing "war" against a tactic against anyone who seems to fit the bill. Critics of this phrase rightly question whether this puts the administration in the right to justify making sacrifices of civil liberties in a Constitutional context when no other sacrifices to this war have been made that affect American civilians (the draft, rationing, etc.).

Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist. He was, however, given due process.