The Torturer in the Mirror by Ramsey Clark

Author:Ramsey Clark [Clark, Ramsey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-60980-315-5
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2011-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

In the wake of the revelations of the Pentagon Papers and other abuses of law and power committed in secret by the government, a series of reforms were enacted to try and limit such abuses.7 The work of leading constitutional scholars, from John Ely to Harold Koh, contributed to attempts to restore the rule of law, despite setbacks such as the Iran-Contra affair.8 But less noticed during this time was the growing pushback from a rising generation of lawyers—notably those in the Federalist Society—who sought to protect and expand presidential power during and after Watergate. The coming to power of the Bush administration in 2000 saw these lawyers and their supporters—notably Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, leading figures in the Ford administration—rise to the highest echelons of power.

Douglas Feith, for example, who served in various positions during the Reagan administration (including as special counsel to neoconservative godfather Richard Perle), convinced President Ronald Reagan not to ratify Geneva Protocol I and wrote publicly about it. In an editorial comment in the American Journal of International Law, Honorary Editor George Aldrich—a member of the Office of the General Counsel to the Secretary of Defense from 1960 to 1965 and of the Office of the Legal Adviser to the Secretary of State from 1965 to 1977, where he was involved in negotiating Geneva Protocol I—noted that leading members of the Reagan administration such as Feith had earlier “grotesquely described Geneva Protocol I as law in the service of terrorism.”9 Many leading jurists, notably Theodor Meron, well known for his work on Shakespeare and the evolution of customary international law, have written in favor of the US ratifying this protocol.10

As the undersecretary of defense for policy in the Bush administration, Feith was crucially involved in both the decision to effectively overturn the Geneva Conventions and in trying to supply intelligence linking Iraq and al-Qaeda.11 We now know from the Senate Armed Services Committee report released in April 2009 that a key motivation for at least part of the programs of torture was to produce exactly such false confessions.12 In league with the other leading torture lawyers of the Bush administration—top Cheney aide, David Addington; White House counsel and later attorney general Alberto Gonzales; deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Council (OLC) John Yoo; assistant attorney general heading the OLC, Jay Bybee; Attorney General John Ashcroft; and general counsel to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, William Haynes—Feith paved the way for US policies of torture. As leading legal scholar Sanford Levinson has noted, the OLC “is probably more important than almost any federal court, including, in some respects, even the Supreme Court.”13 Its decisions are effectively binding in the executive branch unless the president or the attorney general overrule them. The question before us then is what do we do now that a new administration has taken the reins?

Thankfully, a number of leading scholars laid out a series of recommendations before being tapped to serve in high-level positions in the Obama administration.

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