A Blueprint for Holder

Nice op-ed at CS Monitor regarding the framework and moral necessity for Attorney General Eric Holder's pending decision on whether to pursue an investigation of torture under bush and company:

Eric Holder must decide whether to pursue Bush administration lawyers and one sitting federal judge who set the legal stage for officially sanctioned torture and other degrading practices that violated fundamental principles of international law. As Mr. Holder wrestles with this decision, he must consider the gold standard set by his predecessor Robert Jackson at Nuremberg.

(...)

His [Jackson's] opening statement set the tone for the trials:

"That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to reason.... We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity's aspirations to do justice."

(...)

The lawyers Holder may pursue advised President Bush that the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified by the American government, could be ignored. They further argued that acts that America had in the past called torture had now miraculously ceased to be torture. Such positions put those advisers well outside even the furthest boundaries.

This has been my position for some time, but the column puts it more eloquently than I cold hope to.