House Judiciary Subcommittee Hearing

On Tuesday, I attended a hearing of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. This was the first of a series of hearings on the legal framework and the lawyers who have given the administration the legs to stand on with enhanced interrogation techniques.

Rep. Nadler is the chair and called to order a mini-session that ended with them issuing a subpoena to Cheney's head lawyer, David Addington. The full subcommittee hearing began at 10am. There were 4 lawyers as witnesses, and 3 of them were on the right track: David Luban, Marjorie Cohn, & Philippe Sands (the author of a recent book on Torture and an article called "The Green Light", which follows a particular Gitmo detainee story of horror and cover-up).

The 4th witness was David Rivkin, who thought that the history of detainee treatment, legal advice, and the authorization trail should be documented for history's sake, but nothing else should be done with the information. He believes any lawyers implicated in the process of reinterpreting things like the Geneva Convention should most certainly not be threatened with prosecution or accountability for their legal advice because that, in effect, would turn into a witch hunt and would threaten the ability for a President to get “candid” legal advice. He rests on the thought that the legal advice that was given in a variety of DOJ memos were done "in good faith" and it's wrong to "vilify" lawyers who wanted to give interrogators "maximum flexibility." Any efforts to go after lawyers "borders madness."

The other witnesses thankfully didn't possess such a frustratingly glib view of human rights.

• Luban spoke of the "Golden Shield" of impunity, written by John Yoo and others, that must be overturned; he said legal opinions should stay objective, regardless of the client's (administration) desired outcome; and legal opinions should hold to inspection – there’s no reason a legal opinion interpreting the Constitution should be a State Secret.
  
• Cohn showed how the US has now violated the Torture Convention, which we signed in 1984, and the Geneva Convention, particularly under Common Article 3, with our current detainee policies.
  
• Sands told of the story he uncovered about the treatment of Detainee 063. That man was tortured and the trail was covered up; contrary to the administration’s assertion, the abuse (worthy of War Crimes) was not authorized by some maniac general at Gitmo, but rather, it was from the top down – there’s a memo bearing Rumsfeld’s signature and comment, “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”
  

I’d like to hear David Addington – that man smacks of power, secrecy, contempt, and indifference to international law.