Thanks Spencer

This admin does seem to give off a lot of mixed messages, both good and bad. But congrats on naming someone who is honestly against torutre to such an important post

Mixed messages indeed, but the messages have been solidly against torture, they’ve just been chickenspit about punishing torturers, so far.

not in any way to take away from Mr Koh’s qualifications for the post – but can’t help but wonder if he was selected or moved to the front of that line after Cheney’s ridiculous comments

I am very pleased with this pick – hope there are folks sleeping more fitfully with the news

Well, there were stories that treatment at Gitmo harshened after Obama took office. We’ll see. Torture maybe, illegal detention, not so much.

I read them also, but they were supposedly being committed by guards who were opposing the end of their writ.

I remain skeptical. Having recently read Legacy of Ashes, I recently learned that the U.S. almost always tortures. It would be completely unamerican for Obama to stop it.

Just finished watching Taxi to the Darkside.

Ghouls, monsters and tyrants were running this nation.

President Obama has surely dissapointed me, but he’s head and shoulders above these fucking Cheneyite cretins.

-G

Talk is cheap. Legal opinions are cheap. The currency of the realm is prosecutions, and we ain’t seen nearly enough of them.

Righto. And we know Obama is dead set against prosecuting those who directed the torture. Just policy differences, dontcha know.

I think I just ID’d my personal problem with what’s evolving (or not evolving) as the Obama administration takes shape. I wanted zero tolerance to treachery and bullshit. I hoped for consequences all along the line. And I believed we could do so much better, across the board, than Obama’s predecessor (whose name escapes me at the moment). Silly me. I wanted my country to be its best “self.” I dunno if that’s possible any more, and the seeds of that destruction were sown long before Barack Obama entered the picture.

dont’ know how it will all shake out. still hoping for the best. but in the mean time, Thank. God. For Harold.

This is good news, primarily because I believe a person of such strong personal integrity would not join the Obama State Department without certain assurances.

I dunno. One would have to trust the people giving said assurances. Which, not so much.

This is great news. And nice that he doesn’t need Senate approval. I think the torturers will be prosecuted, but Obama won’t go off half cocked.

I thought the reports were that the treatment harshened after Obama was elected…and then continued for a few weeks after his inauguration. That suggests to me an effort by the interrogaters to get their “last licks in” before new policies were implemented. Perhaps they wanted these guys to think that just because Obama was elected, or was actually President, nothing was going to change. You might get a suicide, someone go completely mad, or a bogus confession as a result.

Plus that was the time when the big pressure was on for a general amnesty for the torturers.

I’m so cynical about Obama and torture at this point that my first thought on a torture opponent winding up at the State Department is that he is there to criticize torture–when other countries do it.

It’s interesting that there are new reports that additional Memos regarding the Torture are going to be declassified and released this week. The timing seems more than a coincidence, IMO. I wonder if it will be Koh that will discuss or introduce their release.

Koh seems almost a positron (anti-matter) version of John Yoo. Both are Korean-American, both clerked for Supreme Court Justices, both went to Yale. Koh is clearly the intellectual superior, however. Yoo got where he was because he was a “justifier”, not a sharp analyst of the law.

I’m gonna wait to see what Mr Koh’s presence at State produces.

Should say that Koh and Yoo switched their undergrad and law school histories. Koh was an undergrad at Yale…then Harvard Law, while Yoo did the reverse. Both were summa cum laude as undergrads, but Koh graduated cum laude from Harvard, as well. Koh is about ten years older than Yoo.

Namaste SD and I concur … let the new guy get his peeps in place and see what actions he takes.

In the meantime though, we can offer him plenty suggestions … *g*

Good point. I wondered, too, if Obama isn’t taking on Cheney with this move. Mano a mano.

Interview with KO on WEDU last Friday evening. In the Video On Demand box scroll down to the Florida This Week link.

The interviewer is Rob Lorei, News Director of WMNF Tampa. In the late 1970s he and a few folks went door-to-door collecting money to start a community radio station. Today WMNF is one of the leading community stations in the US.

I want this guy to talk to the Lake!

Well, since you find the US nigh indistinguishable from certain European regimes, why not be unamerican?
(And I swear I’m gonna read Legacy of Ashes asap)

Yeah, I know. Fortunately, as I understand the law, the govt may have no CHOICE but to prosecute, but I imagine that particular wheel of justice would take many years to grind.

Is there a statute of limitations on war crimes?

which crimes?

Torture specifically…but we’ll also take Renditions for $600…

Well, I certainly can do a very nice rendition for $600, but I don’t think I’ve seen rendition defined as a war crime anywhere.
You might want to see the War Crimes Act of (I think) 1996 for US law. I would think that the usual rules apply, murder and complicity in murder have no time limit for bringing an indictment.

Feel free to mock all you want…I would just like to see the Bush Crime Family behind bars. And yes, I am somewhat concerned that Obama’s little nuances in some of the recent pleadings will just drag things out, which is why I’m concerned about the statute of limitations.

Emptywheel’s done a great job with all of this…Obama’s actually sided with the Bush Administration in some of these filings…but after hearing Jonathan Turley on Rachel tonight, it seems to me that eventually Obama’s gonna either have to shit or get off the pot.

Once the next three “memos” come out, he might have no choice but to appoint a Special Prosecuter.

I think perhaps that’s Obama’s game… he’ll let “events” force his hand in assigning same…the man is very shrewd.

At least, I hope so.

If you object to my little rendition joke, I’m sorry to hear that, but I thought that I was trying to help answer your question.
You have to define renditions in other terms, and unless other crimes result in murder there are going to be time limits. A possible exception would be if the crimes were to be found to involve conspiracy. If so all criminal actions of a conspiracy are, in theory, not subject to time limits until the date of the end of the conspiracy. At that time, the usual limitations start their countdown.

For the record, I got your joke and actually laughed out loud…but this
is serious stuff we’re talking about here.

With regard to rendition, I obviously (or so I thought) meant “extradinary redition”, whereas one is picked up off the street in “a foreign country” and taken to another “foreign country” where one is subjected to uh…”extraordinary interrigation techniques.” Which in Cheneyese means torture.

Which is a War Crime.

Unless, of course, you’re a Repubican.

Thanks for playing. I’ll take “Renditions for $600″ back because you’re obviously a Michele Bachman acolyte.

Excuse my ignorance; does this appointment need to be confirmed by the Senate, or are the Republicans unable to delay it?

As I haven’t heard of the lady, I’m more likely to obliviously be her acolyte.
Thanks, while I enjoyed playing, it doesn’t sound like I got a lovely parting gift.

It’ll be especially interesting to see what he says about the legality of rendition in particular, and, relatedly, on the repatriation of detainees to countries where they’re likely to be abused, as with the Uighurs at Guantanamo Bay that Daphne has so diligently been tracking.

Yes, let’s see if the Obama administration can be legal and humane and honorable to those whose lives were shattered at Gitmo. Let’s see how if they can settle the situations of detainess who have become stateless persons like the Uighurs(taking into account that the Uighurs were falsely imprisoned and supposedly tortured at Gitmo by both the US and Mainland Chinese.) Let’s take into account that our government has caused many of the detainees to become stateless persons and therfore defenseless, and that is something the Nazis prior to the holocaust. Reparations are in order.

I had to read a lot of Harold Koh for a class I took on U.S. Foreign Policy Law. I have to say that at that time I decided, and have had no reason to reconsider, that I want this guy as the next Supreme Court justice.

It’ll be especially interesting to see what he says about the legality of rendition in particular, and, relatedly, on the repatriation of detainees to countries where they’re likely to be abused, as with the Uighurs at Guantanamo Bay that Daphne has so diligently been tracking.

Last I heard, Mainland China doesn’t want them. I’ve read that MC didn’t want Albania or any other country to take them. Which leaves . . . the US. I’d hate to think of “repatriation” as the equivalent of “disappeared.”