The theological justification for al Qaeda’s wholesale slaughter of civilians was provided by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, one of the founding fathers of al Qaeda. Because the murder of innocents is forbidden in Islam and the murder of Muslims in particular, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden required some sort of theological framework for justifying terrorism. This was provided by al-Sharif, who essentially argued in his book, “The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge,” that apostates could be murdered, and that approach, takfir (which has come to be known as takfirism) allowed al Qaeda to, for all intents and purposes, kill anyone they wanted without violating the laws of Islam by declaring them to be apostates. In other words, Dr. Fadl helped provided a theological justification for something that everyone involved knew was wrong.
The legal memos justifying torture aren’t very different in terms of reasoning–it’s clear that John Yoo and his cohorts in the Office of Legal Counsel saw their job not as binding the president to the rule of law, but to declare legal any tactic that the executive branch believed necessary to fight terrorism. They worked backwards from this conclusion, and ethics officials at the Department of Justice, we now know, decided that they they had violated professional standards in doing so. Whereas al-Zawahiri and bin Laden turned to al-Sharif for a method to circumvent the plain language of the Koran, Bush and Cheney went to Yoo and Jay Bybee to circumvent the plain language of the law. Most Islamic scholars, just like most legal experts, reject their respective reasoning as unsound.
The chief author of the Bush administration’s “torture memo” told Justice Department investigators that the president’s war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be “massacred,” according to a report by released Friday night by the Office of Professional Responsibility.
The views of former Justice lawyer John Yoo were deemed to be so extreme and out of step with legal precedents that they prompted the Justice Department’s internal watchdog office to conclude last year that he committed “intentional professional misconduct” when he advised the CIA it could proceed with waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques against Al Qaeda suspects.
John Yoo is (in)famous for writing the legal rationalisations for the Bush Administration’s by-passing of law and, for some, morality to pursue surveillance, rendition, and “enhanced interrogation”. Still, he didn’t suffer too badly for his service, winding up as a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The Australian television show The Chaser’s War on Everything decided to put Yoo’s Bush-era legal theories into practice in his classroom:
Two days ago, we flashed back to the 2003 legal framework for the Bush Administration’s authorisation of torture (Mora: “Are you saying the President has the authority to order torture?”; White House lawyer John Yoo: “Yes”). In case you thought that was simply a rogue comment, consider this exchange between a questioner and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at Stanford University (it begins at about 0:58 in the clip):
In case you didn’t catch it, Rice says, “the president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture….And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.” Read the rest of this entry »
Just compiling notes for the book and came across this account from Alberto Mora, who was General Counsel for the United States Navy in the Bush Administration, of a conversation with John Yoo of the White House Office of Legal Counsel:
On February 6th [2003], Mora invited Yoo to his office, in the Pentagon, to discuss the opinion. Mora asked him, “Are you saying the President has the authority to order torture?”
This morning, I was catching up with the newspapers when a friend/reader Skyped about our recent item, “Dick Cheney’s Fox Interview and the Defence of Torture”: “Surely there must be some date by which I can hope to never ever see Cheney’s face on EA again.”
While I could understand the sentiment, it also brought on depression about how this torture discussion will probably “go away”. The barrage of news stories and commentary — now that many in the American “mainstream” media, with the Bush Administration in the rear-view mirror, has decided torture should be noticed — brings on fatigue. Now that Cheney, formerly the most secretive Vice President in history, has decided that he will incessantly shine his own distorted light on “enhanced interrogation”, I have the sense from his smirk that he knows he is wearing us down. Read the rest of this entry »
For the defendants of the use of torture by U.S. forces — still led by former Vice President Dick Cheney — this has been a rocky few weeks, with the publication, in swift succession, of the leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (PDF), based on interviews with the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, which concluded that their treatment “constituted torture” (and was accompanied by two detailed articles by Mark Danner for the New York Review of Books), the release, by the Justice Department, of four memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2002 and 2005, which purported to justify the use of torture by the CIA, and the release of a 231-page investigation into detainee abuse conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee (PDF.) Read the rest of this entry »
The politics of torture rumbles on. Facing criticism over the release of the four memoranda documenting the Bush Administration’s authorisation of “enhanced interrogation” (from Bush defenders: releasing the memos jeopardises national security and/or torture worked; from Bush critics: OK, so who is going to be prosecuted for this?), President Obama manoeuvred through a short statement yesterday in response to a reporter’s question (the exchange begins at 4:26 — transcript below):
Obama began with the rhetoric that “there are still enemies out there” being fought by “courageous people” who have to make “difficult decisions” but the memoranda showed we were “losing our moral bearings”. Then his deliberate answer got interesting: Read the rest of this entry »
Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic:
The legal memos justifying torture aren’t very different in terms of reasoning–it’s clear that John Yoo and his cohorts in the Office of Legal Counsel saw their job not as binding the president to the rule of law, but to declare legal any tactic that the executive branch believed necessary to fight terrorism. They worked backwards from this conclusion, and ethics officials at the Department of Justice, we now know, decided that they they had violated professional standards in doing so. Whereas al-Zawahiri and bin Laden turned to al-Sharif for a method to circumvent the plain language of the Koran, Bush and Cheney went to Yoo and Jay Bybee to circumvent the plain language of the law. Most Islamic scholars, just like most legal experts, reject their respective reasoning as unsound.
Just compiling notes for the book and came across 
This morning, I was catching up with the newspapers when a friend/reader Skyped about our recent item, “Dick Cheney’s Fox Interview and the Defence of Torture”: “Surely there must be some date by which I can hope to never ever see Cheney’s face on EA again.”
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