With little attention in the media, the Justice Department has filed papers in federal court arguing that the CIA did not have an obligation to preserve the infamous torture tapes and therefore was lawfully entitled to destroy them. The filing patently demonstrates the conflict of interest in Attorney General Michael Mukasey insisting that the Justice Department investigate the possible criminal conduct in the matter. Now, the Justice Department is not only investigating itself, but it is investigating a crime that it has rejected as baseless in court filings.
Clever, eh? Those DoJ lawyers are on their toes.
The D.C. Circuit Court ruled yesterday in Rasul v. Myers […] that four former Guantanamo prisoners […] may not sue Rumsfeld and military officers for torturing them because, in ordering the torture, those officials were not “act[ing] as rogue officials or employees who implemented a policy of torture for reasons unrelated to the gathering of intelligence.”[...]
Upholding the lower court, the D.C. Circuit [finds]: “it was foreseeable that conduct that would ordinarily be indisputably ‘seriously criminal’ would be implemented by military officials responsible for detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants.”
The actual torture commanders cannot be held responsible, because it was “foreseeable” that they would implement torture in the course of their duties.
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