>On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Bill Bartlett
><billbartlett at aapt.net.au>wrote:
>
>To prosecute the authors of the torture memos is not to punish someone with
>> whom you have a policy dispute; it is to hold accountable perpetrators of a
>> terrible crime, now matter how well intended that crime was as a means to
> > protect against further terrorists attacks, also terrible crimes.
>
>
>Prosecuting someone for a legal opinion is fundamentally no different than
>criminalizing any other sort of opinion.
First of all, I didn't write that, it was an opinion post to the WSJ, which I quoted. Second, some "opinions" should indeed be punishable. There are some opinions that you should keep to yourself, some opinions that are so repulsive that a civilised society is entitled to punish.
Legal opinions should not be exempt, in fact even more so. A lawyer who advises someone that torture is legal really ought to know better. So the crime is made worse, unless the lawyer is able to prove that they really are completely ignorant of the law.
In this case, it is quite ingenuous to pass the conduct off as mere "opinion", it is at the very least blatant incitement to commit a criminal offense for a government lawyer to advise government employees that orders they have been given to torture a prisoner are legal.
In fact, it is likely the lawyers are guilty of more than mere incitement, but are really accomplices. In the circumstances, it might even be argued that the lawyers are guilty of coercing reluctant government employees to engage in torture, by justifying illegal orders that the interrogators would have otherwise gone out of their way to defy.
Of course the interrogators should have sought independent legal advice if, as should have been the case, they doubted the legality of their orders. So its not really any excuse for them that they were under pressure. But that doesn't absolve the lawyers of guilt.
>And if arguing that unambiguous atrocities are perfectly compatible with
>bourgeois law is a crime, a lot of us should have been packed off to the
>Supermax a long time ago.
Yes, well if you encouraged someone stupid enough to listen to you, that they should go ahead and assassinate George Bush by telling them that it was perfectly legal to do so on the first Tuesday in a month ending in "R", then you should expect to be packed off to jail.
I doubt if a defense of "...I was only expressing a legal opinion," would cut any ice with the prosecutor or the jury.
So perhaps this unambiguous atrocity (torture) is perfectly legal. Why don't we let a jury decide if torture is perfectly legal? Or incitement to torture, or aiding and abetting torture?
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas