I’ve been watching the pundits a lot on television recently and following the ongoing national debate about whether torture was or was not used and whether it was justified. Often, it’s a semantical discussion in which defenders of the Bush administration claim that waterboarding isn’t torture, but that whatever it was, it was absolutely necessary.
One point of contention is whether the lawyers who wrote the legal opinions ought to be prosecuted and/or disbarred or otherwise disciplined for writing those opinions in bad faith in order to justify illegal torture. Last year I read a book by German historian H.W. Koch, called “In the name of the Volk: Political Justice in Hitler’s Germany.”
If anybody has doubts as to whether lawyers should be held accountable for these actions, they should read that book. They should also watch the Costa Gavras film from France, “Special Section,” about the courts of the Vichy regime and how they were perverted to fulfill Nazi demands to produce bodies for execution in a way that seemed to meet the requirements of “law” and the “constitution,” even if it defied the substance of justice.
Equally important is the movie, “Judgment at Nuremberg,” which starred Spencer Tracy, William Shatner, Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster, Maximillian Schell, Montgomery Clift, and Werner Klemperer amongst others. It’s all about why we prosecuted judges who served the Nazi regime.
Finally, think about the legislation passed in the haste of the September 11, 2001 catastrophe when the administration began jailing people without releasing their names and/or whereabouts, giving them no access to lawyers. Then read Jacobo Timmerman’s book, “Prisoner without a name, Cell without a number,” about his experience in Argentina, arrested for the crime of being a newspaper publisher. It’s more than vaguely reminiscent….
