Filth

It strikes me that because of my profession I can actually provide some useful context to my last post, about the Bush torture memos President Obama released today, and I'd be remiss if I didn't do so.

I'm an articling student, a kind of apprentice lawyer, which is a one-year position following law school that graduates in my jurisdiction, Ontario, Canada, must fulfill immediately before becoming lawyers. If I were in the US I'd be a lawyer already -- but them's the breaks!

Much of what I have done for a living over the last year is write legal memos; it's the main job of articling students. I have written a lot of memos. What the Obama administration ordered released today were legal memos, like I write all the time.

What happens with a legal memo is this. Someone seeking an opinion -- a lawyer, or a government department, like the Bush CIA in this case, asks a question. In this case the question was: are our interrogation techniques legal?

What makes these memos so awful and evil is that they don't try to answer that question in good faith. A proper memo would say: there's case law saying this, which means that what you're suggesting -- putting a prisoner in a tiny box for hours, and since he has a fear of insects, putting insects into the box, and telling him that the insects will sting him -- would be considered illegal torture by the courts. Maybe there's other case law going the other way. So you say: these other cases say we could get away with it. But it's uncertain what line of cases the courts would decide to follow. So I (the memo's author) don't draw a firm conclusion.

What these memos do is different. They say: It could be argued that putting bugs in the box with the prisoner won't cause lasting psychological damage. It could be argued that waterboarding (simulated drowning) won't cause permanent psychological damage to the prisoner. It could be argued that shackling the prisoner from the ceiling for up to eleven days to prevent him from sleeping for eleven days will not cause him permanent psychological damage. So it's legal.

Whether it's legal or not is for a court to decide. The memo-writer cannot know what a court will decide. Her job is to explain the arguments that both sides will use, and how likely they are to succeed. These memos, written by experienced lawyers, don't do that. They just say: what you're doing is OK. That's what Bush & Co. wanted them to say; that's why they ordered them. They're legal cover, that's all, because a government in a country purporting to be governed by the rule of law can't do anything that a lawyer hasn't okayed.

These memos are garbage, and worse, they're war crimes themselves. The CIA agents who relied on them should be immune from prosecution. But the lawyers who wrote them should be disbarred and prosecuted to the extent of the law they pissed on and betrayed.