Comforting delusions

If waterboarding is not torture then chocolate isn't fattening, smoking is not hazardous to ones health, cops never arrest the wrong person and that nice fellow offering to sell it to us has a genuine deed to the Brooklyn Bridge. We are talking about comforting delusions here folks. They happen because there are always some things that we would prefer to believe even when they are ridiculous. Well trained legal professionals offering legal advice should be above crude delusional errors of this kind. When they pretend not to be it is another comforting delusion that they would like us to believe in.

Not only should Yoo and Bybee have been held to account instead of perpetuating the expedient fiction that they commited only innocent errors but so should the CIA and other governmental lawyers to whom their torture memos were addressed. As legal professionals themselves they are responsible for exercising independent critical judgment. They have no excuse for not rejecting the memos as the frauds they clearly were.

It is official: sanctioning torture is not punishable.

Late Friday is when government officials make announcements that they hope will go little noticed. Here is today's, found first not on the NYT or WaPo websites but in the British Guardian's:

An inquiry by the US justice department last night reprimanded two senior Bush era lawyers who approved the use of torture at Guantánamo Bay. The department found the two lawyers, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, guilty of poor judgment but not professional misconduct.

Either this is yet more politically motivated deliberate and disgraceful misinterpretation of the law or the seemingly clear laws against torture, including the Geneva Conventions, are absolutely useless. I can see no possible third alternative. Evidentally an Administration willing to politicize the DOJ can do whatever it pleases with impunity and even count on a successor Administration to acquiesce to its malfeasance.