Latest rationale against prosecuting torturers: It might upset Republicans.
"When you get one administration prosecuting its predecessor, you start creating the conditions of a banana republic," said Philip Heymann, a law professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who served as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton. "Every Republican in the country would think this was a dangerous attack on the two-party system."
Let me see if I've got this straight: Deciding to prosecute interrogation policies that are most frequently associated with banana-republic-style dictatorships runs the risk of turning the United States into . . . a banana republic. Or maybe Sean Hannity's definition of a banana republic, who knows.
This is just foolishness. The question has nothing to do with the integrity of the two-party system. It has everything to do with the simple question of whether or not the executive branch of the Federal government is bound under the Constitution to act within the confines of laws enacted, and treaties approved, by Congress, or whether it is free to re-interpret and re-write any laws or treaties as it sees fit in the total absence of any Constitutional authority to do so. It is a simple question, really, and it has an equally simple answer, and one need not have worked as a professor of law at Harvard University (!) to be able to figure it out.
Word to the regents in Cambridge: Fire this idiot. Do it now. And did I mention today that it's time to appoint a special prosecutor?
---Vitelius
Comments