The Truth About Torture

As distasteful it is for me to give up prosecution, I do believe by pardoning these constitutional thugs will allow us to get them to publicly answer about the mis-deeds without the shelter of the 5th Amendment and without a current President throwing up his shield of "Executive Privilege".

I can only hope Bush includes himself and Cheney on the pardon list.

I can

I pon

Wow. This is the essence of blind Village thinking. Oh my gosh I go to cocktail parties with these people, they can't be put in jail! That's only for Black and Mexican people!!! The greater the responsibility that people have, the greater the need for full investigation and unavoidable punishment when they violate the laws that apply to them. Otherwise, we are no different from a Latin American banana republic.

Shocking - how can this person claim to be a journalist if they don't believe the laws apply to our politicians and bureaucrats!

Look up 'impunidad" in a dictionary of Mexican politics - it means the ruling class never goes to prison, no matter how much they steal. That is the current position of those who would protect Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

I disagree completely with Stuart Taylor. The crimes committed by the Bush administration are so numerous and outrageous that they cannot be ignored and swept under the table by some phoney-baloney "truth commisson." Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the people responsible for these crimes should be made to answer for them. Bush committed a felony by ordering his people to violate the wiretap laws. There is absolutely no excuse for not impeaching him and turning him out of the White House for doing so. The law is plain and clear, and there is no question at all that Bush violated the law.

Those who wrote the legal opinions allowing torture should be prosecuted, along with those who authorized the torture based on those opinions, along with those who carried out the torture. It was and is illegal and here too the law is clear and plain...the law was violated and those who violated should be prosecuted.

If we allow these crimes to go unprosecuted, then we allow those who violated the law to elevate themselves above the law. What do we then do the next time someone like Bush gets elected and starts violating the laws....allow it to happen again?

Stuart Taylor is advocating nothing more than the abandonment of the rule of law and the discarding of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, all in the name of convenience!

I am DISGUSTED that Newsweek would support the pardoning of war crimes! You have now proven to me that you are part of the larger corporate raping of America. I will never trust Newsweek again in any of its reporting. You are part of the problem. Shame on you!

I am DISGUSTED that Newsweek would support the pardoning of war crimes! You have now proven to me that you are part of the larger corporate raping of America. I will never trust Newsweek again in any of its reporting. You are part of the problem. Shame on you!

AndyO is right and Newsweek should never be considered a reliable source of the truth. Complicity is the least of our worries, the world could literally be crumbling(as opposed to the metaphoric crumbling actually occurring) and no American media would even report it unless our corporate oligarchy could benefit extensively as they have with misleading the US into war

How . . . extraordinary.

To imagine that Newsweek would publish an article calling for presidential pardons for those responsible for torture? What an extraordinarily disgusting, sickening article. I am so sick and tired of the media complicity in the crimes of this administration.

If I had been told that there would be this kind of defense of torturers in the United States ten years ago, I would have branded the speaker a madman and somply walked away.

This is a hoax right?
I mean it is pretty funny.
EVERY person in the chain that allowed this stain on the American Empire needs to go directly to Jail.
You know, Do Not Pass Go and all that stuff - dirrectly to jail.
The nazis were held accountable and so should these folks who followed in their footsteps.

Torture is never acceptable. It is important that the rest of the world sees us aggressively prosecuting those who torture and those who condone or ordered it. This will help repair our image and possibly prevent the torture of our soldiers as they serve. Newsweek should fire Taylor now. Articles like this do nothing but hurt Newsweeks image. Pure hypocritical drivel.

Newsweek should be ashamed of themselves for printing such propaganda. My hope is that Stuart finds himself in the first wave of criminals swept up and punished for the wide and seemingly endless varieties of venal corruption foisted upon this great country by the Mayberry Mafia.

When horrible crimes have been committed, of course it makes sense to pardon everybody who might have been involved before beginning any earnest investigation.

No. The Nuremberg trials have established the precedent that you are not allowed to do horrible things even if your commanders say they are okay. This is the standard we will stick to.

As the only species that remembers and records its history, we have a responsibility to learn from it. The Inquisition was wrong, Nazi crimes were wrong, South African apartheid was wrong, and torture is wrong. We have had no meaningful investigation into the crimes of the Bush administration, and we're not going to let everybody off scot-free before we even know what happened.

Re: The Truth About Torture

Stuart Taylor???s proposal not to prosecute members of the Bush administration who may be accused of war crimes but to let them testify with immunity before a ???truth commission??? is ridiculous. If anything, criminal investigations are indeed warranted to ascertain the level and responsibility that permitted the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere.

Taylor???s assertions that ???The officials involved appear to have approved only interrogation methods found legal by administration lawyers, and in particular by the Justice Department???s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).??? is likewise a simplistic view meant to exonerate the deeds, actions, and approval in the offices of the President, Vice-President, Department of Justice, Department of State, and the Department of Defense, to abrogate the terms of the Geneva Conventions, and the Torture Laws signed by the government of the United States.

Taylor???s entreaty for the President to give those accused a ???pass??? does not pass muster. He (Taylor) might well review the Nuremberg Tribunal???s findings, and especially the 1947 trial of Josef Altsotter et al., also conducted by the Tribunal.

The mark of a good and great country is that it rectifies its mistakes by making a public accountability for them and a public demonstration of applied justice as well.

Charles Betz

Re: The Truth About Torture

Stuart Taylor???s proposal not to prosecute members of the Bush administration who may be accused of war crimes but to let them testify with immunity before a ???truth commission??? is ridiculous. If anything, criminal investigations are indeed warranted to ascertain the level and responsibility that permitted the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere.

Taylor???s assertions that ???The officials involved appear to have approved only interrogation methods found legal by administration lawyers, and in particular by the Justice Department???s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).??? is likewise a simplistic view meant to exonerate the deeds, actions, and approval in the offices of the President, Vice-President, Department of Justice, Department of State, and the Department of Defense, to abrogate the terms of the Geneva Conventions, and the Torture Laws signed by the government of the United States.

Taylor???s entreaty for the President to give those accused a ???pass??? does not pass muster. He (Taylor) might well review the Nuremberg Tribunal???s findings, and especially the 1947 trial of Josef Altsotter et al., also conducted by the Tribunal.

The mark of a good and great country is that it rectifies its mistakes by making a public accountability for them and a public demonstration of applied justice as well.

Charles Betz

halides1
Justice is not only finding out the truth, but also PUNISHMENT for those that commit the crimes. Your reasoning would let the Mafia bosses off the hook as long as they confessed their crimes, but punishment for the foot soldiers would be swift. Distaste for criminal behavior is fine, but pardons would condone the behavior, both literally and figuratively. That's a message we need to send to the world, "Do as we say, not as we do." The only way we will win back the respect is by actions, and those actions must include punishment for anyone involved in this despicable episode, which was done in our name.

Very convenient argument for criminals to make after the fact. "lets look to the future and not to the past. Wonder if i could use that in court? ANY nazi war criminal or even Saddam would have loved to use this same line of BS to get off scott free. Sorry Stuart, Those who broke the law knew they were doing do and IF we are a nation of laws, they apply to all, not just the rich and well connected.
Good try Stuart. You sound like OJ's lawyer ( believing your own drivel). Most people with half a brain are not going to forget WHERE we are, and HOW and WHO got us here....But good try anyhow.