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.

Bright new day; filth exposed to sunlight * Updated *

[hat tip: Greenwald.]

Today President Obama decided to release four secret memos of law written to provide legal cover for the torture of prisoners held by the United States. These memos, as Glenn Greenwald has said, "constitute what can only be described as secret law under which the U.S. was governed during the Bush era."

Defying resistance from the intelligence establishment, which feared that agents would be exposed to potential prosecution, Obama has ordered these memos released in their entirety, with only the agents' names redacted. In a statement today, however, he has guaranteed that no agents who relied on these memos in good faith will be subject to prosecution:

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution. The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world. Their accomplishments are unsung and their names unknown, but because of their sacrifices, every single American is safer. We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs.

But the truth must come out, so the filth can be burnt away by the sun, and this never happens again.

Update:

Here they are.

Update 2:

Oh, man. These are so fucked up -- a nightmare. Absolutely read them.

Update 3:

The image above isn't just an illustration. Please read what it says. Remember the context: this is a memo drafted by a government lawyer at the request of the Bush CIA to give an opinion as to whether the interrogation techniques they'd adopted were legal.

George Will yells at clouds

The great conservative thinker writes a column opposing jeans. Schmuck.

An impression I regret to have conveyed

It came to my attention today that the counter at the bottom of the page is only counting "unique" visitors, by which it means people who have only visited the site once. I think each of us is unique. This is no less true of those of you who repeatedly, even obsessively, visit this blog.

Please forgive the unintended slight. I am in pursuit of a less narrow-minded counter.

Contrary to what was known

They've been deceiving us all this time.

Contrary to what was known, all octopuses are venomous, a new study finds.

Like many of you, I owned several octopuses growing up. (The comments section is full of stories of folks who had different species of octopus as pets when they were kids.) So this came as a shock to me, as I'm sure it has to you.

When I think of all the times they let me snuggle them, sleep with them curled up at the foot of my bed, while all along they were slowly poisoning me, lowering my reading and math scores on standardized tests (maybe keeping me out of med school, in the end), well, I feel kind of betrayed.

Please feel free to share your stories in the comments. None of us should feel alone right now.

Tribute to patriotism/fitness

[hat tip: Gadsden Flag]

AR! GEN! TI! NA! * Updated *

Counter at the bottom of the page tells me someone from Argentina is viewing the blog. Buenas noches! Que buena tu chimba! Quiero comer tus pasteles! Welcome to a very exclusive club! Which of your friends can claim to have seen this blog? Frea-king none of them. Not one. I bet that feels good.

Um, if you want your country's name broken into monosyllabic, exclamation-pointed sections, just visit. This is something I do.

Some business to take care of from earlier (sorry for troubling you with it; I know you're busy people): Po! Land!

Update:

U! Nited! States!

The more pedantic among you will notice that that I haven't broken up the second and third syllables of the name of your country (or not your country; I certainly don't mean to confine pedantry to the US -- it flourishes everywhere, like some kind of moss or lichen that flourishes everywhere and therefore fits the simile). I have done this to suggest, as you've probably already guessed, and surely unshakingly believe, that the US has been "nited" (or Knighted) by History to lead the world in certain respects at certain times but emphatically not in other respects nor at other times. But nevertheless and nonetheless, and, of course, notwithstanding.

Sorry for stating the obvious in so many words. Thank you and good night.

Lord knows you don't need me to show you this

You've seen it already, I'm sure. But I'm my biggest reader right now -- by a fair margin -- and I wanted to document how awfully moving I think this moment is.

A term of seemingly, distressingly, limitless application

[hat tip: Sully]

I mean, of course, douchebag. I worry that the word is just too perfect -- that it seems to too completely encapsulate all kinds of baggery, from the guy wearing sunglasses on the train, to the guy who waxes his eyebrows and very much looks as though he waxes his eyebrows, all the way to the guy who's rude to the waitress. It's just no good when a single word takes over for a bunch of other, more precise words, but always now I find myself saying, aloud and in my heart, in all sorts of situations: "What a douche!"

You see the dilemma. Lexical rigour versus what simply feels good.