Lefty prof tortures reason

Reason obeys itself: ignorance submits to what is dictated to it.

~ Thomas Paine

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a member of USA Today’s board of contributors. Turley is a media doyen and perhaps one of the most singular voices against America’s so-called “torture” policy of enemy combatants and Muslim fanatics imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Turley’s one-man crusade against “torture” in my view has little to do with sober legal reasoning, but in essence tortures reasoning, common sense and America’s judicial traditions regarding prisoners of war going back over 400 years to common-law times. Turley not only accuses former President George W. Bush of multiple war crimes for the torture of Muslim terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, but makes a critical point in an interview on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC – namely, “that the moral burden of torture is on the backs of each one of us until these people are brought to justice. And it will be profoundly immoral to let them go.”

Turley further states:

We have Third World countries that when they have found that their leaders committed torture war crimes, they prosecuted them. But the most successful democracy in history … [does] nothing about it. And that’s an indictment not just of George Bush and his administration. It’s the indictment of all of us if we walk away from a clear war crime and say it’s time for another commission.

Liberal and secular law academics like Turley and his compatriots in the Democrat Party and in groups like the ACLU and CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) seem not to understand that the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 has made it clear that the “enemy combatant” class of war criminals have none of the liberal protections of regular prisoners of war, let alone access to full constitutional rights enjoyed by every American citizen – yet Turley continues his rants against George Bush and his so-called crimes against humanity for torturing innocent people imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.

That professor Turley is a respected lawyer and scholar of constitutional law makes his legal views on torture particularly outrageous. Note the landmark United States Supreme Court decision Rasul v. Bush (2004), where the majority established that the U.S. court system has the authority to decide whether foreign nationals (non-U.S. citizens) held in Guantanamo Bay were wrongfully imprisoned. Also, the 2008 Supreme Court decisions in the Boumediene and Al-Odah cases, which now gives full constitutional rights to enemy combatants, has set the stage for the Justice Department to be forced to free many if not all of the 300-plus irredeemable foreign combatants. If this is done, the American public will be extremely endangered. The war on terrorism will suffer irreparable harm.

Therefore, the issue here is, can the president, under his broad investigatory powers and war powers, prosecute any and all wrongdoing against American citizens, even using harsh interrogation techniques, or are these techniques considered torture? Ms. Maddow opened up the interview with Turley on this very subject of torture, and Turley responded in his usual adroit, affable but sophistic manner:

This is not a close legal question. Waterboarding is torture. It has been defined as a war crime by U.S. courts and foreign courts. There’s no ambiguity in it. That’s exactly why they [the Bush administration] have repeatedly tried to stop any court from reviewing any of this.

Time and space will not permit me to do a point-by-point analysis of Turley’s twisted legal reasoning, if you can even call it reasoning. What Turley is essentially trying to do is use his coveted position as a respected constitutional law attorney and legal scholar in effect to make GOP interrogation policy unconstitutional. Turley is trying to make being a Republican, or, more precisely, a conservative, illegal … even a war crime. His perverse logic is subtle, convincing, but very Machiavellian and ultimately unconstitutional.

Because of his secular humanist jurisprudence, Turley doesn’t seem to understand or appreciate that he is championing the rights of fanatical Muslim terrorists that would gladly slit his throat while chanting, “Allah Akbar!” That he favors the rights of murders and terrorists over our brave American soldiers whom these defendants have either killed, wounded, maimed or attempted to kill is particularly galling to me. That Turley is allowed to get away with this sophistry virtually unchallenged is like George Orwell’s “1984” in 2009 writ large.

Turley is admittedly a very affable man, a scholar well-versed in the Constitution. He is a master of making sweeping generalizations about the Constitution, the illegality of torture and the limits of executive privilege, particularly on the question of the president’s war-making powers. Now that Turley has a certified socialist in the Oval Office in Obama, let’s see if the good professor will make the rounds on the news networks with an impassioned critique of Obama’s enemy combatant policy – a policy that I predict – despite his call to close down Guantanamo Bay in one year – will either be exactly the same as Bush’s policy or even more draconian than his predecessor.

Nevertheless, professor Turley, in an article written Jan. 29 for USA Today and reposted on his blog, www.jonathanturley.org, gave us a clue to how neutered and compliant his rhetoric will be in favor of Obama:

… [I]t is becoming increasingly clear what is not going to change (at least for the better) in the Obama administration. With all of the euphoria of the inauguration, many supporters fought back a strange and long-lingering sensation: doubt. … Yet, given his tendency to avoid fights on issues like war crimes and unlawful surveillance, Obama seems to view “change” in terms of social programs rather than legal principles.

Wow! That’s it? Turley’s rhetoric above on President Obama is a far cry from his previous and frequent calls to have President Bush, members of the Justice Department and an assorted cadre of CIA, FBI and military operatives handling the terrorists at Guantanamo Bay prison to be brought up on war crimes and torture allegations.

Is it the Constitution Turley is advocating in favor of, or is he cloaking his own myopic, perverse and ultimately irrelevant personal policy preferences as legitimate constitutional jurisprudence? You be the judge.

 

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