What Does Rumsfeld Need to Do To Be Fired?
Law prof. Marty Lederman explains (in great detail) that “Army Confirms: Rumsfeld Authorized Criminal Conduct:”
On November 27, 2002, Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes, following discussions with Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz, General Myers, and Doug Feith, informed the Secretary of Defense that forced nudity and the use of the fear of dogs to induce stress were lawful techniques, and he recommended that they be approved for use at Guantanamo. (The lists of techniques to which Haynes was referring can be found in this memorandum.) On December 2, 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld approved those techniques for use at Guantanamo — and subsequently those techniques were used on detainee Mohammed al-Qahtani.
In other words, the Secretary of Defense authorized criminal conduct.
Loyalty to your subordinates should stop when they break the law. Its time for Rumsfeld to face charges for his actions.
(Image from SocialNetve.org.)
Maybe if he shot the president??
If he was informed that forced nudity and the use of scary dogs were lawful techniques, then where’s the criminality?
I’m still not convinced that those technioques amount to anything CLOSE to torture. If you want to read about torture, then read about what Saddam was doing to his prisoners, cutting off hands and tongues, organized gang rapes, etc.
The question here is not torture, the question is the lawfulness of the technique. Did you read the linked article?
IIRC, the linked article said that the UCMJ was violated, and that the UCMJ didn’t apply to the SecDef. The article also said that the Decider-in-Chief has been advised (by Gonzales and Yoo) that he has the authority to ignore statute as part of his Constitutional role as the executive. The SecDef implements the policy of the executive.
So, the answer is that if you believe in this theory of the unitary executive, then these actions cannot be illegal. It is literally a contradiction in terms. That is why this theory is dangerous. The torture bit is a shadow on the cave wall, as is the NSA surveillance.
@Sama: Other detainees have been beaten about the legs so severely it looked (quoting a military MD) like they had been “run over by a bus”. Can we agree that that is torture? How about waterboarding?