More on Ashcroft:

Antonin Scalia Is an Enemy of the State!

So says John Ashcroft. Jeffrey Dubner reports

GET YOUR ROBES OUT OF OUR PRISONS! I just watched John Ashcroft's address to the Federalist Society. It's a gripping speech, and quite frightening. He devotes the greatest portion of it to challenging the Supreme Court's decisions in Rasul v. Bush, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, and the other "enemy combatant" cases. A taste:

...intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas of treaties can put at risk the very security of our nation at a time of war.

It's very much in the vein of "the ability to set aside the laws is inherent in the president." There's no transcript available just yet, and I expect there'll be analyses and critiques up by more qualified legal folks than I by the time we get back from the weekend. But I wonder how confined this constitutional theory is to Ashcroft, and whether it will in any way leave office with him. I highly doubt it.

UPDATE: Tonight's keynote speaker is, of course, Federalist Society member and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. He's as like as not to agree with Ashcroft on this, although it's hard to be sure.

I do think that this is, in part, fallout from Bush v. Gore. Everybody knows that Scalia and company don't believe the equal protection rationale they set forward for their decision. And if what the Supremes are doing is expressing their political preferences rather than setting forth judicial principles--well, why should their will get to override Bush's and Ashcroft's? Just because Scalia, Rehnquist, and company ruled in favor of Bush in 2000 doesn't mean that Bush and company respect them for it.

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Karl Rove goes on the BBC and defends waterboarding and tries to justify its use by saying that it's not a black and white issue and reasonable people can disagree. Huh? In his twisted mind the Iraq war was pretty awesome too even though there were no WMD's found.

Leave it to the BBC to not pussyfoot around with an interview.

In a BBC interview, Karl Rove, who was known as "Bush's brain", said he "was proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists".

He said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, should not be considered torture.

In 2009, President Barack Obama banned waterboarding as a form of torture.

But the practice was sanctioned in written memos by Bush administration lawyers in August 2002, providing legal cover for its use.

--

"I'm proud that we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists and gave us valuable information that allowed us to foil plots such as flying aeroplanes into Heathrow and into London, bringing down aircraft over the Pacific, flying an aeroplane into the tallest building in Los Angeles and other plots," Mr Rove told the BBC.

"Yes, I'm proud that we kept the world safer than it was, by the use of these techniques. They're appropriate, they're in conformity with our international requirements and with US law."

Hey, Turdblossom----waterboarding is torture. It's always been considered torture and there is no reasonable middle ground position to argue that point. The Geneva Conventions addressed that and the interviewer reminded him of those pesky treaties. The Bush administration even said it was so in their own memos.

A Bush administration memo from 2005, intended to establish a legal basis for aggressive interrogation techniques, contains a footnote that actually describes waterboarding as falling within the administration's definition of torture.

The footnote, found within one of the Office of Legal Council memos released by the Obama administration on Thursday, suggests that officials in the previous White House likely knew that they were torturing terrorism suspects at a time when they claimed to not be involved in such a practice. Bush officials also acknowledged in a different footnote that for a period of time, waterboarding was "used with far greater frequency" and "intensity" than advised, so much so that medical personnel could not confirm the safety of the detainees.

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Sean Hannity is so upset that Barack Obama believes waterboarding is torture. He's dumbfounded that one of the great intellects of the conservative movement, George Bush committed war crimes by breaking the Geneva Conventions:

McCain: I believe torture is unacceptable and a violation of the Geneva Conventions. I believe however that these memos were not necessary to be released. We cannot criminalize people giving bad legal advice which is what some in the Congress want to do and it's time to move on.

Hannity: Do you think that what President Obama said the other night, what I believe the waterboarding that was used was torture, that President Bush was sanctioning torture?

McCain: I believe it was wrong to waterboard. I think it was wrong to do it because it's in violation with the Geneva Conventions, but I think we've got to move forward. We must move forward.

Giving advice that allows our country to torture is not criminalizing politics, but enforcing laws and treaties we faithfully signed on to. "Just turning the page" is Beltway talk for "getting a free pass."

I'm not sure why Hannity even bothered bringing this up with McCain. I guess he figured that if he brought it up in the context that Bush sanctioned torture, he would get McCain to change his tune. I know math isn't one of Hannity's strong suits so I'll give him a little math equation. If 1+1=2, then if waterboarding=torture and Bush approved of it, then:

Bush+waterboarding=the sanctioning of torture.

Glenn Greenwald on why we're bound by law to prosecute torture cases. (Incidentally, he also points out that a new report states that Bush officials were informed that the legal memos submitted to justify torture were slanted to fit administration policy):

The U.S. really has bound itself to a treaty called the Convention Against Torture, signed by Ronald Reagan in 1988 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1994. When there are credible allegations that government officials have participated or been complicit in torture, that Convention really does compel all signatories -- in language as clear as can be devised -- to "submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution" (Art. 7(1)). And the treaty explicitly bars the standard excuses that America's political class is currently offering for refusing to investigate and prosecute: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture" and "an order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture" (Art. 2 (2-3)). By definition, then, the far less compelling excuses cited by Conason (a criminal probe would undermine bipartisanship and distract us from more important matters) are plainly barred as grounds for evading the Convention's obligations.

There is reasonable dispute about the scope of prosecutorial discretion permitted by the Convention, and there is also some lack of clarity about how many of these provisions were incorporated into domestic law when the Senate ratified the Convention with reservations. But what is absolutely clear beyond any doubt is that -- just as is true for any advance promises by the Obama DOJ not to investigate or prosecute -- issuing preemptive pardons to government torturers would be an unambiguous and blatant violation of our obligations under the Convention. There can't be any doubt about that. It just goes without saying that if the U.S. issued pardons or other forms of immunity to accused torturers (as the Military Commissions Act purported to do), that would be a clear violation of our obligation to "submit the [torture] case to [our] competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution." Those two acts -- the granting of immunity and submission for prosecution -- are opposites.

And yet those who advocate that we refrain from criminal investigations rarely even mention our obligations under the Convention. There isn't even a pretense of an effort to reconcile what they're advocating with the treaty obligations to which Ronald Reagan bound the U.S. in 1988. Do we now just explicitly consider ourselves immune from the treaties we signed? Does our political class now officially (rather than through its actions) consider treaties to be mere suggestions that we can violate at will without even pretending to have any justifications for doing so? Most of the time, our binding treaty obligations under the Convention -- as valid and binding as every other treaty -- don't even make it into the discussion about criminal investigations of Bush officials, let alone impose any limits on what we believe we can do.

Even by the president’s standards, his speech today on torture policies was remarkable.

“In this new war, the enemy conspires in secret — and often the only source of information on what the terrorists are planning is the terrorists themselves. So we established a program at the Central Intelligence Agency to question key terrorist leaders and operatives captured in the war on terror. This program has produced critical intelligence that has helped us stop a number of attacks — including a plot to strike the U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into Library Tower in Los Angeles, California, or a plot to fly passenger planes into Heathrow Airport and buildings into downtown London.

“Despite the record of success, and despite the fact that our professionals use lawful techniques, the CIA program has come under renewed criticism in recent weeks. Those who oppose this vital tool in the war on terror need to answer a simple question: Which of the attacks I have just described would they prefer we had not stopped?”

Seriously? To question whether the United States government is torturing people, outside the law and treaties to which we are a part, is necessarily to “prefer” that terrorists execute successful attacks?

Also, pointing to today’s list, Dan Froomkin asks, “Which of those attacks was more than a fantasy? And which would not have been stopped with more humane and arguably more effective interrogation techniques?”

Why wasn't he talking about this two years ago?

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Matthews: Two years ago, King Abdullah of Jordan warned me of what was coming in the Mideast. His prediction was dead on. He spoke of his fears and what the United States was doing in Iraq, toppling one government, electing another, was creating what he called a Shi’a crescent, from Tehran through Baghdad to Beirut that threatened to dominate the Arab world, challenging modern Sunni governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and others with an axis of Shi'a power based in Iran.

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David E and that colored fella offer some thoughts on NY's gay marriage rulings. One thing is certain: God Hates Figs...

The Existentialist Cowboy: "If certain acts in violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."
—Justice Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor for the United States, Nuremberg Tribunals
We're gonna need a guide to understanding fascism.

Bob Geiger has some of the week's best editorial cartoons.