The dissection of “find themselves” leads me to further ask, “Did we torture within the US?”

It is strange. It leads me to wonder whether the detainees may have been tortured while under the influence of psychoactive/coercive drugs, i.e. was the OLC trying to find a way to argue that the detainees were not in any state to recognize anything at all in a rather desperate straw-grasping attempt to evade the plain language “find themselves”?

But Function at the Junction is definitely more fun than either.

Part two: It’s been this way in the past (not always, but lots of the time), but it has usually been much harder to spot what these big bad wolves are up to, or to see just who ‘they’ are. That’s old news. When most people couldn’t see the plan and the players, they didn’t have to decide much beyond day to day stuff, for after all, if you can’t find the source of the pain, how can you make intelligent decisions what to do about it? That was actually calming in its own way because, for the most part, people were relieved of the responsibility to decide what parts of their lives they would risk and how they would take on risk in order to (hopefully) have actual control of all of their lives.

Part three: Now we know. The law is not the law. It is a weapon or it is ignored, but it is not intended to apply to all nor does it. Who writes the law after all? This places the big scary burden of personal decision making right in front of people, where they can no longer ignore it. Many of those people have become quite used to not having to decide more than a few important things in their whole lives. That is no longer possible because a decision to look away, look the other way, whine that it’s all ‘too much to confront’ is no longer a comfortable option. That is now clearly as important a decision as whether or not to become a soldier, a parent, etc. Looking away can no longer be seen as a responsible option. No one else will save you. No one else can make decisions about your life that are better than the worst decisions you can make. THAT is scary as hell to most people, and you may be one of them. It’s understandable to be frightened of contemplating actions that were once ‘unthinkable’. But it is no longer a defensible position to not think those thoughts. You can’t take ‘violating the law’ off the table simply because it is the ‘law’. The law is not the law. Seeing the context is the only way to see your way around the ‘problem’ of violating the ‘law’.

In sum: the issue is not how ‘they’ interpret the law to tie your hands. It is: why do (will) you go along with it? There are options. What the financial and other crises have now shown is that ALL current options are fraught with danger. There are no safe paths. There never were, but some could squint ‘just so’ and sort of convince themselves that there were. The only reason I am spelling out what you already know in your heart is to help you make it more conscious and intentional that this is how things really are. For it is only with intelligence and fully concentrated awareness on the part of lots of people that any real breakthroughs in the way this world works are likely to happen. Change is what you say it is when it changes your life, directly. Politicians can try to steal the word but they can’t own it. Only you can. When I drove VW bus many lives ago, I had a sign in the rear window: “Be Alert! The world needs more Lerts.”

I’m just saying…
-TA

In other contexts, however, “and” is used disjunctively, in which case anyone of among two or more conditions by itself would be sufficient to trigger a particular result

[Italics mine]

Yoo just destroyed any credibility for a grammar/word usage argument by misusing the word “anyone”. It doesn’t mean the same thing as “any one” [of], as he apparently thinks it does.
Which, for me, if I were his boss or a judge, would have meant I’d have quit reading right there and made him do it completely over.
Sigh. REading Yoo has always hurt my brain. This minor (not to a real grammar maven!) quibble is about the best I can do. I bow to the rest of you, and will return to reading.

Tel Aviv Judge Defends Rights of Arab Anti-War Protestors

The Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court Wednesday quashed a request to restrict the movement of four Arab residents of Haifa who demonstrated against the war in Gaza, with the prosecutor saying their protest “damages national morale.”
…
“There’s no doubt that freedom of expression is the most precious element of democracy, but only while maintaining the boundaries between the permitted and the prohibited,” prosecutor Victoria Ben-Meir said, c… “Let us not forget that we’re talking about a time of war; the entire incident damages the national morale,” she said.

But the judge took Ben-Meir to task. “As we know, the real test of the readiness of a society to stand up for the freedoms it cherishes is precisely during times of difficulty and distress,”

Going back to EW’s question on Powell, for the March memo it is interesting that one goes to Gonzales first, then is used as a bootstrap reference in the footnotes, right from the get go, in the “draft” memo on setting up torture shipments of human cargo. While the memo on the 18th is signed out, the one on the 19th is circulated to Addington’s Haynes, to Rice’s Bellinger and Powell’s Taft. We know that Bellinger sat in on the “creative torture” meetings and has refused to say waterboarding Americans is torture and was the pliant puppy who replaced Taft at State. We know that Haynes biggest problem with torture was keeping his drool off the memos. We know Goldsmith took the torture field trips and sat silent on torture at OLC and through misrepresentations to the Sup Ct. Taft, though, not so much. If the memo of the 19th never got signed out to final, my wild guess would be bc of the input from Powell’s office and Taft. fwiw.

From a Horton “Six Questions” with Mary Ellen O’Connell (Notre Dame prof with a book out on International law that does NOT follow the Goldsmith/Posner posit of, “whatever you’re big enough to get away with at the time, that’s the law”) done early in Dec:

http://www.harpers.org/archive…..c-90003966

5. The Legal Adviser in the State Department, John Bellinger, has advanced a series of radical excuses for American shortcomings in connection with the programmatic introduction of torture and disappearances. In arguments presented to the Committee Against Torture, he argued that the Convention Against Torture was inapplicable in wartime (which in the view of this administration is all the time) because the law of armed conflict was a lex specialis that ruled the field. What do you think of the Bellinger argument? Might it have been contrived to deal with the criminal law exposure that Bellinger and others in the administration face?

Bellinger is wrong. The prohibition on torture is a non-derogable, absolute prohibition binding on the United States at all times. While there is a lex specialis applicable in armed conflict, fundamental human rights protections are not suspended when that law is triggered. And I should add the law of armed conflict is triggered by real armed conflict where intense fighting between organized armed groups is occurring—not phony wars like the “global war on terrorism.”

When Bellinger left the National Security Council for the State Department to take over from Will Taft, his first speeches attempted to do what the torture memos did—make complicated arguments on the law and weigh down the critics in the details. His arguments were not as plainly erroneous as the torture memos, but they were far from the best analysis. Bellinger took this approach on detainee issues but also respecting other international law issues faced by the United States—such as executions of persons in defiance of their rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations and orders of the International Court of Justice. More recently, I think he has moved away from this strategy to one perhaps following Jack Goldsmith: Convince people you support the rule of law, distract them from your role in torture, disappearance, and abuse, then when the accounting comes hope the focus lands on others. Bellinger has come out in strong support for the Law of the Sea Convention and even the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Heritage in the Event of Armed Conflict–he was writing op-eds on these topics just as the ACLU obtained the document produced at the Office of Legal Counsel dated August 4, 2004, saying that waterboarding is not torture. According to the ACLU, waterboarding was discussed at meetings of the National Security Council when Bellinger was present.

emph added

IMO, our 2 headed dictator can join the circle of Caligula.

Harsh words? What they have done to America is more than harsh.