No amount of rationalization and excuses will change the
fact that waterboarding is torture. It's a crime under US and international law. The
Bush administration and their cheerleaders can call it whatever they want, come up with euphemisms for it, but waterboarding is torture and torture is
a crime.
You claim that “
those decisions saved lives,” a claim that, quite frankly, is still up for debate, but even if it did, doesn't change the
fact that it is a crime. Convenience is not a compelling legal argument.
If the Bush administration thought waterboarding was something they had to do, then they should have repealed all the federal laws and opted out of
all the international treaties that ban torture, like the Geneva Conventions, or the UN Convention Against Torture signed by Pres. Reagan in 1988.
But they didn't, instead they tried to work their way around the law, knowing the implications of their actions—in a
January 25 2002 memo to the President,
White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales argues that opting out of the Geneva Convention “
substantially reduces the likelihood of prosecution under
the War Crimes Act” (p. 2); Attorney General Ashcroft inquired John Yoo on the feasibility of “advanced pardons” at the request of the CIA
as reported in the
OPR report (p. 55).
You say that it is “
easy to sit on the sidelines and make determinations.” Yes, indeed it is. But I didn't make the oath to “preserve,
protect and defend” the Constitution. Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Ashcroft and others, on the other hand, did.
Isn't it easier to make the difficult decisions when you don't care about the Constitution and the law? Being on the sidelines and making
determinations is not a crime. Violating the Constitution is.
