{"id":1416,"date":"2009-04-26T08:12:50","date_gmt":"2009-04-26T14:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=1416"},"modified":"2009-04-26T08:12:50","modified_gmt":"2009-04-26T14:12:50","slug":"boiling-of-the-blood-around-the-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=1416","title":{"rendered":"Boiling of the blood around the heart"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a fairly simple argument for exploring the possibility of criminal trials against those who justified, ordered and performed torture: torture is illegal.  David Broder<\/a>, however, seems very confused about the nature of legality.  He writes:<\/p>\n

\n

But now Obama is being lobbied by politicians and voters who want something more — the humiliation and\/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past. They are looking for individual scalps — or, at least, careers and reputations. <\/p>\n

Their argument is that without identifying and punishing the perpetrators, there can be no accountability — and therefore no deterrent lesson for future administrations. It is a plausible-sounding rationale, but it cloaks an unworthy desire for vengeance.<\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Holy crap is that silly.  Vengeance is irrelevant to whether or not someone has broken laws.  Let's say, for the sake of argument, people have broken the law.  The people who trusted them with their vote (and those who didn't vote for them, but implicitly "trusted" them anyway) have a right to be rather narked (I don't know how to spell that Britishism properly) about their violating that trust.  There being angry about it, however, is an independent, mostly irrelevant, fact about their character used ad hominemly to distract the reader from drawing the correct conclusion.<\/p>\n

It's about as irrelevant as the following:<\/p>\n

\n

The memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision,<\/strong> made in the proper places — the White House, the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department — by the proper officials. <\/p>\n

One administration later, a different group of individuals occupying the same offices has — thankfully — made the opposite decision. Do they now go back and investigate or indict their predecessors? <\/p>\n

That way, inevitably, lies endless political warfare. It would set the precedent for turning all future policy disagreements into political or criminal vendettas. That way lies untold bitterness — and injustice<\/strong>. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The question is not whether the torture decision was a policy decision–we all know that it was–the question is whether that policy decision was legal.  Just because the right people sat in a room and debated it doesn't mean it's just politics.  It only makes the crime (should there be determined to be one) worse.     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a fairly simple argument for exploring the possibility of criminal trials against those who justified, ordered and performed torture: torture is illegal.  David Broder, however, seems very confused about the nature of legality.  He writes: But now Obama is being lobbied by politicians and voters who want something more — the humiliation and\/or … Continue reading Boiling of the blood around the heart<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,61,10],"tags":[346,1987,1962,508,99],"class_list":["post-1416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-circumstantial","category-david-broder","category-ignoratio-elenchi","tag-ad-hominem-circumstantial","tag-david-broder","tag-ignoratio-elenchi","tag-non-sequiturs","tag-torture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1416"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1416\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}