{"id":2458,"date":"2009-04-16T19:58:10","date_gmt":"2009-04-17T00:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/?p=2458"},"modified":"2009-04-16T19:58:12","modified_gmt":"2009-04-17T00:58:12","slug":"another-step-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/?p=2458","title":{"rendered":"Another step back"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is quick. After writing the previous post, I learned that Obama has explicitly barred prosecutions of those who did the torturing, officially approving the “just following orders” defense that we (as it turns out) self righteously rejected at Nuremberg.<\/p>\n

The idea that anyone would have a “good faith” belief in the validity of a secret legal opinion is self refuting, particularly when everyone involved knew that the entire process was a charade.<\/p>\n

Here’s a simple suggestion. Let’s put an end to the possibility of this happening again. First, lets start from the premise that the concept of “secret law” is antithetical not just to democracy but to any legal system that aims at any sort of legitimacy. Then, let us pass a law, the public kind, something along these lines:<\/p>\n

\n

It shall not be a defense in any criminal prosecution that the accused relied on a legal opinion rendered by any agency of the United States government unless that opinion was published in full in the Federal Register prior to the act alleged in the indictment.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course, I suppose that the next group of Bushies could just craft a legal opinion saying that they could ignore the statute, but it would be tough to convince a court to go along with that, and even Obama, I truly believe, would have a tough time believing that anyone could have a good faith belief in the validity of that dodge.<\/p>\n


<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is quick. After writing the previous post, I learned that Obama has explicitly barred prosecutions of those who did the torturing, officially approving the “just following orders” defense that we (as it turns out) self righteously rejected at Nuremberg. The idea that anyone would have a “good faith” belief in the validity of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lawyer-stuff"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2458"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2459,"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458\/revisions\/2459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctblueblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}