(As the Obama Administration seeks to "normalize" the criminal practices of the Bush Administration, it seems that it may have a LITTLE problem with international law... - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
On Saturday, the New York Times reported that administration officials are "alarmed" by the military commission case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen seized as a 15-year-old by U.S. forces in Afghanistan who's now spent a third of his life in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. Trying an alleged child soldier based largely on confessions he made after being threatened with gang-rape and murder is not the case the Obama administration had hoped to showcase in its first military commission trial.
But the argument in a new paper published today by Loyola Law School professor David Glazier should give the administration even more cause for alarm. Glazier, an expert on international law and the laws of armed conflict, argues that the military commission trial of Omar Khadr is itself a war crime.
It is now acceptable to go on national TV and argue openly for the use of torture as formal US bi-partisan consensus policy.
I went looking to see what I could find in terms of prominent media figures defending the use of torture, and here's what I found.
Most egregious is radio host and (non-practising, I hope) attorney Michael Smerconish who is a regular contributer to Hardball. Here he is in December of 2008:
This is [J. Glenn] Gray's principle, which I mean to adopt and expound: "The greater the possibility of free action in the communal sphere, the greater the degree of guilt for evil deeds done in the name of everyone."16 The principle invites us to focus our attention on democratic rather than authoritarian regimes. Not that free action is impossible even in the worst of authoritarian regimes; at the very least, people can resign, withdraw, flee. But in democracies there are opportunities for positive response, and we need to ask to what extent these opportunities fix our obligations, when evil deeds are committed in our name.
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 2nd Ed, 1977. p298
STATE BLOGS
