Yeah, and these two Bush appointees are just as credible with this claim as Bush was about his false claim about the WMD in Iraq.
"Any president who wants to apply such techniques without such a binding and durable legal opinion had better be prepared to apply them himself."
We will be fortunate if we only ever have one president, George Bush, who wanted to apply such techniques, and was wholly and completely unprepared to apply them himself. He let others do it for him.
Opinions from the OLC are, "now more likely than before to be subject after the fact to public and partisan criticism."
Actually, now that we have a Democratic instead of a Republican president, opinions from the OLC are more likely than before to be subject to and reflect the law.
And finally, in their attempt at distortion and obfuscation, "In his book 'The Terror Presidency,' Jack Goldsmith describes the phenomenon we are now experiencing, and its inevitable effect, referring to what he calls 'cycles of timidity and aggression.'"
What Hayden and Mukasey failed to mention is that Goldsmith resigned after 9 months after a failed attempt to moderate what he considered the constitutional excesses of the legal policies embraced by his White House superiors.
Also glaringly and obviously missing completely from their article is any mention of the Geneva Convention, that it is the law of the United States, and that it specifically prohibits the torture that they refer to exclusively as "techniques" and that they are so proud of.
If we are ever to see justice done and the people who wrote the torture memos are prosecuted for conspiring to and aiding and abetting torture, then this article is the document giving, in their own words, their approval and condoning of the torture. They were in charge of it happening and they were legally obligated to see that it was stopped and the torturers were prosecuted.
They did not do that, instead they have joined with the torturers and self-confessedly made themselves subject to prosecution.
Hayden and Mukasey should heed Ari Fleischer's admonition when he was trying to suppress the free speech of those protesting the illegal policies of the Bush administration: "Watch what you say." They are so arrogant and sure of themselves that they have no realization that what they've said here can be used as evidence and cause them to wind up in court, trying to deny that they ever said any such thing.
But, here it is, in their own words. I'll keep a copy handy, just in case.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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