If it was good enough for the Indians…

We now know that five lawyers, calling themselves the “War Council,” in compliance with orders from the President and Vice President,

drafted legal opinions that circumvented the military’s code of justice, the federal court system and America’s international treaties in order to prevent anyone — from soldiers on the ground to the president — from being held accountable for activities that at other times have been considered war crimes.

The idea for military commissions was actually resurrected by John Yoo from procedures used during the Indian wars:

The military commissions that the U.S. used against Native Americans during the mid-19th century were often ad hoc and frequently resulted in natives being hanged or shot.

Read the rest of this report at:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees/story/38886.html

The report is part of a series by McClatchy journalist Tom Lasseter, who carried out an eight-month investigation on the detention and abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Guantánamo:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees/story/38773.html

Memo: Laws Didn’t Apply to Interrogators

The Justice Department [in the person of John Yoo] sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president’s ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/01/AR2008040102213.html

The Torture Team

 Remarks delivered at the City University Law Review Symposium “Preventing Torture,” in New York City, March 28, 2008, by Scott Horton

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/03/hbc-90002745

 ”…Torture was introduced as a result of conscious decisions taken at the pinnacle of power in Washington. Vice President Cheney was a principal instigator; President Bush was certainly fully informed, and consciously lied about it in dozens of public appearances. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, was the principal legal architect of the torture system, and he was aided and abetted in the process by a number of senior figures in the Justice Department. John Yoo and Jay Bybee are two of the more central figures in the opening phase, but Alice Fisher, Michael Chertoff and Steven Bradbury each also played an essential role. Jim Haynes, now general counsel to Chevron, and then Rumsfeld’s lawyer in the Pentagon, was another. The story of this team and its dark enterprise pursued under the guise of national security remains lamentably underdeveloped….”