They Call That Scam "Sharia"

"I'll break your back, and make you humble!"

Tennessee state senator Bill Ketron insists that his proposed anti-Sharia measure (formally known as the "Material Support to Designated Entities Act") is not intended to criminalize the peaceful practice of the Muslim religion. Instead, it would permit the prosecution of those who offer tangible support to entities identified by the state attorney general as "Sharia organizations" devoted to promoting Islamic rule through violence. Such an act would be a felony punishable by a fine of unspecified size and a prison term of up to 15 years.


If enacted and applied with a degree of intellectual honesty, Ketron's measure would require Tennessee law enforcement to shut down every military base and recruiting office in the state, as well as rounding up all resident veterans of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Promoting Sharia law in Iraq through the use of criminal violence has been the official policy of the United States Government since the new Iraqi constitution was finished in late 2004. 

As U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Stephen Coughlin -- described as the Pentagon's leading expert on Sharia law -- pointed out in a recent deposition: "Article 2 of the Iraqi Constitution states that `Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation.[...] No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.'" That constitution was not produced by Iraqis themselves; it was drafted by a committee created by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S-created cabal of social engineers and war profiteers that supervised the occupation and "reconstruction" of Iraq from 2003 until 2005. 

During the past decade, only one formerly secular country fell under the rule of sharia law: Iraq. This wasn't done by al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, or any of the other Islamist groups that torment the dreams of people suffering from toxic levels of exposure to the War Party's propaganda; it was done by the government afflicting the United States of America.

"Let's see: What freedoms can I trample today...?"

Though his qualifications as an imam are sketchy at best, Tennessee State Senator Ketron  presumes to define "Sharia" as "a legal-political-military doctrinal system combined with certain religious beliefs" that "requires all its adherents to actively and passively support the replacement of America's constitutional republic...." Jihad and sharia, Ketron insists, are "inextricably linked," and the "imposition of sharia on non-sharia adherent states is to be brought about both by criminal and violent means ... and by lawful and non-violent means...." 

This means that even those who peacefully and lawfully practice the tenets of sharia can be considered criminal subversives: 

 

"The knowing adherence to sharia and to foreign sharia authorities constitutes a conspiracy to further the legal, political, and military doctrine and system which embraces the law of jihad.... The knowing adherence to sharia and to foreign sharia authorities is prima facie evidence of an act in support of the overthrow of the United States government and the government of this state through the abrogation, destruction, or violation of the United States and Tennessee Constitutions by the likely use of imminent criminal violence...."

Once again, if applied with the kind of consistency required by the principle of equal justice under the law, Ketron's measure would dictate the prosecution of military personnel who participated in the patently unconstitutional Iraq war. In addition to deploying U.S. servicemen to kill and die on behalf of sharia, that war -- and the vile policies that sprouted from it -- fortified the "leader principle" at lethal expense to whatever was left of our republican institutions.

Every crime contains at least two components -- the malign intent (mens rea), and the guilty act (actus reus). Perhaps Ketron and his comrades will insist that Iraq war veterans are exempt from the anti-Sharia act because most of them didn't knowingly adhere to the doctrine they were propagating at gunpoint. This would mean that in their case mens rea was absent, despite the violent, criminal acts that were committed. However, in the case of peaceful Muslims, mere belief in their religious code would be construed as both criminal intent, and a guilty act.

Anti-Christian persecution rages in sharia-dominated Iraq

Tennessee's Muslim population, while quite small, is growing -- a trend that has been exploited by compulsive Mosque-baiters seeking to capitalize on fears of "creeping sharia." 

Most of the growth consists of refugees driven from their homes in Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, and other countries that have experienced the healing touch of the Empire's armed benevolence. Ending armed entanglements in, and covert subversion of, Muslim countries would do a great deal to stop the exodus of refugees, and reduce the possibility of cultural conflicts here at home. Ketron doesn't appear interested in solutions that might actually work; like any aspiring Grand Inquisitor, he's much more interested in tearing windows into men's souls.


Among the onerous provisions of Sharia law are restrictions on the sale and consumption of wine and other alcoholic beverages. One possible reason why Sen. Ketron is so anxious to arrest the tide of Sharia-inspired fanaticism may be the difficulty he has experienced in trying to enact legislation permitting non-Muslim residents to purchase wine at grocery stores.
 
In a letter to a constituent, Ketron lamented that the influence of religious fanatics who consider wine to be haram (unclean) made it impossible for his measure to his measure to find traction: "I am currently trying to pass legislation that allows wine to be in the grocery stores again, and the liquor lobbyist has threatened ... to `unleash the preachers' across the state." In fact, at least one of Tennessee's subdivisions, Moore County, seems to be in danger of succumbing to sharia, insofar as alcohol prohibition is concerned.


Oh, wait -- the fanatics responsible for this are Baptist preachers, not Muslim imams, and the problem (as Ketron acknowledged) isn't that Tennessee has fallen under the shadow of the Crescent, but rather that it's being strangled by the "Bible Belt." That comparison, I must admit, is a little unfair, since in at least some Muslim countries Sharia-based restrictions on the sale and consumption of liquor don't apply to non-Muslims.


Within the constituency to which Ketron is pandering we almost certainly will find more than a few people who were thrilled to the marrow by the recent town meeting confrontation between Rep. Allen West (R. Florida) and Nezar Hamze, executive director for the South Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Rep. West, who was cashiered from the military for abusing a detainee in Iraq, presents himself as an authority on the iniquity of Muslims. The source of his expertise is the experience he obtained by killing so many of them who were defending their homes against a foreign army that had invaded their country.

Mr. Hamze, who -- unlike West -- has actually read the Koran, brought a copy of it to the town meeting and asked West to show him where that book sanctions violence against innocent people. Rather than offering an honest answer, West recited a litany of crimes committed by people professing the Muslim faith since the Seventh Century. 

Apparently, Hamze and those who share his religion -- whether or not they have ever committed or countenanced a crime as individuals -- are collectively guilty for the atrocities to which West alluded. However, we Christians bear no similar moral burden for criminal acts committed in the name of the Cross.

I suspect that West, his pose as a Christian statesman/warrior notwithstanding, knows as little about the Bible as he does about the Koran. At the very least, his copy of the Holy Book apparently doesn't contain the eighteenth chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, in which the Author informs us: "The soul who sins, he shall die: the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be on him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be on him." 

Beneath the sanctimony and hypocrisy displayed by West in that exchange, we confront, once again, a dreadful irony: Unlike West the "war hero," CAIR representative Hamze has never shed blood on behalf of sharia. 

Allen West's pugnacious ignorance has made him a matinee idol to the same people who are being conditioned to view British welfare parasite Andy "Anjem" Choudary as the second coming of the Sudanese Mahdi. 

Choudary, who heads up a tiny knot of nitwits calling themselves "Islam4UK," is on the speed-dial of every cable TV producer looking for a savagely bearded Muslim caricature to spice up an otherwise drab interview segment. He has performed his Stone Age Muslim Barbarian shtick on ABC's This Week with Christiane Amapour, CNN's Parker/Spitzer program, and numerous other TV shows. 

This Thursday (March 3), Choudary is planning to hold a demonstration in Washington for the supposed purpose of inciting American Muslims to rise up on behalf of sharia.

Choudary touts himself as a voice of "authentic" Islam, and those who peddle anti-Muslim alarmism eagerly validate that title. Despite having no clerical credentials or any verifiable expertise in the tenets of his religion, Choudary claims to be a "sharia law judge."

No burqas here: Andy Choudary in party-animal mode.

While studying to become a lawyer, Andy (his real given name) Choudary was a boozing, porn-consuming party animal who somehow persuaded dozens of women to sleep with him -- offenses that, according to his own pronouncements, would earn him a "lashing."

Andy was expelled from the legal profession in 2002. He's been a failure as a husband and father, and at present he is a welfare-devouring loser. He has no standing as a cleric, and I doubt his influence extends far beyond his tax-fattened shadow. Yet somehow we're supposed to see him as a threat?

Choudary is a sideshow caricature right out of professional "wrestling"; he's like the Iron Sheik, minus the subtlety. Like any good "Heel," Andy the self-appointed imam knows how to work an interview to build "heat" for his chosen angle, which is why trend-sucking idiots like Sean Hannity insist on giving him exposure. But the inescapable fact is this: Choudary and the handful of subsidized mouth-breathers he gathers around him are about as representative of Islam as Fred Phelps and his little troupe of in-bred, hate-intoxicated losers are typical of Evangelical Christianity.

For some reason, I fail to be terrified.

  Unless somebody discovers how to weaponize stupidity, Andy Choudary will never pose a genuine threat to anybody. Yet the herd-poisoners who compose the War Party's media auxiliary are turning Choudary into the face of jihad. 

By the end of the week, millions of people will  know his name, execrate him on cue, and be satisfied that they're well-informed and commendably patriotic. Not even a bare handful of them are familiar with Mohammed Junaid Babar, an actual Muslim terrorist who helped plan and coordinate the July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London, in which four coordinated suicide bombings murdered scores of people, and mutilated hundreds more. Despite his crimes and his professed hatred for America, Babar has been freed from prison after serving no more than two years behind bars -- thanks to the intervention of the federal government.


Babar, who helped set up the camps in Pakistan where the 7/7 plot was organized, was imprisoned in June 2004. Final sentencing was deferred, however, because of what the Federal Government calls his "exceptional cooperation" with law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Babar's "cooperation" began more than a year before London experienced a shock comparable to 9/11; according to the London Daily Mail, Babar had identified the ringleader of the 7/7 attacks no later than August 2004. Yet the massacre took place anyway -- and Babar was released from federal prison after serving only four and a half years of a possible 70-year sentence.


"People get four and a half years for burglary," observes Graham Foulkes, a British magistrate judge whose 22-year-old son, David, was among the victims of the terrorist plot Babar helped organize. "They can get more for some road traffic offenses. So for an international terrorist who's directly linked to the death of my son and dozens and dozens of people to get that sentence is just outrageous." 

The outrage is compounded by the fact that Babar was actually behind bars for only a fraction of that time. At his parole hearing it was mentioned that Babar "has been out on bail for a considerable period of time, over the last year and a half or so...." In fact, as Foulkes points out, prior to being paroled, Babar was allowed to wander the streets of America for at least two years, during which time he married and began a family.

Not a "stealth jihadist": U.S.-supported terrorist Babar in Pakistan.

Babar, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, went to Pakistan following 9/11. His travels (including visits to London, where he communed with members of the radical al-Muhajiroun group) were carefully monitored by U.S. intelligence agencies. 

There is reason to believe that his "cooperation" actually began no later than 2003. This would mean that he was organizing Pakistani terrorist training camps under the supervision of U.S. intelligence -- and that his "arrest" was actually a case of an asset being "brought in from the cold."

In testimony before a British court in 2007, Babar described how he and his al-Muhajiroun comrades (who may have included fellow controlled asset Andy Choudary, who joined the group sometime after 2002) would repeatedly watch videos of the 9/11 attacks and how everyone present "was in praise of those who carried it out."



During Babar's parole hearing, federal officials blithely dismissed those utterances -- as well as Babar's central role in organizing and facilitating mass murder in London. According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Brendan McGuire, "the government draws a distinction between Mr. Babar's views [regarding terrorism as a "holy war" against America] and Mr. Babar's intent on acting on that view." 


This lenience is remarkable, considering the fact that the same U.S. Government just won a 25-year prison sentence against 21-year-old Virginia resident Zachary Chesser for offering "material support" for terrorism. Chesser, who converted to Islam in 2008, posted incendiary comments on Muslim-themed websites, including links to documents about jihad and what was described as a death threat directed at the creators of South Park in retaliation for depicting Mohammed. 


Chesser expressed remorse in a letter to the court. In announcing the sentence, however, District Judge Liam O'Grady was unimpressed by the young man's act of contrition, denouncing him as "an extraordinarily energized traitor to your country." This imprecation was hurled in the face of a foolish young man who had not actually done anything to harm anybody. 

Chesser's problem is that he never performed a patriotic service comparable to that offered by prized intelligence asset Babar, whose hands incarnadined with the blood of at least 52 innocent people, or the military heroes who brought the blessings of sharia rule to Iraq.


Video Extra: Babar trained terrorists "with the full knowledge of the American secret service":




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Let's Play "Name That Arab Despotism"!

There is a large and powerful Arab state ruled by a Soviet-trained military dictator. The figure he has chosen as a successor, the head of the secret police, was also trained in the Soviet Union, and the apparatus of terror and repression he supervises was created with valuable input from the KGB. Thus it's not surprising to learn that he is one of the most notorious torturers in a region where that occupation is common. During one torture session he supervised, that thug actually offered to cut off the arm of a prisoner in order to please representatives of his regime’s chief foreign sponsor.

Despite the fact that this country has seen its gross domestic product grow consistently for the past thirty years, the percentage of its population in poverty has grown even faster.  The entrenched socialist oligarchy devours practically all of the wealth created in the country, and is also sustained by lavish foreign subsidies. 

The Dear Leader portrays himself as a humble old soldier, a self-abnegating servant of the country. It's entirely possible that he actually believes his own propaganda; this would explain why that simple son of toil has amassed a fortune estimated in the billions. Meanwhile, at least a million residents of the capital city are permanently homeless and can be found sleeping in cemeteries. 

The existing economic and political cartel in the country we're discussing is quite similar to the one in charge of post-Soviet Russia. Shortly before relinquishing its monopoly on political power, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union apportioned its membership among several "contending" parties. At the same time, the Party deeded to itself everything of value in the country in anticipation of "privatizing" the economy. In this way, the Nomenklatura protected its power and perquisites against the vagaries of electoral politics.

The controlled implosion of the Soviet Communist Party in 1991 was a neat trick -- but the ruling elite of the Arab state we're discussing actually did the same thing decades earlier. In 1974, its ruling Arab Socialist Union calved off two "contending" parties -- one on the "right" and another on the "left" -- while re-naming itself the National Democratic Party (NDP) and laying claim to the "moderate center." 

Until very recently, the NDP -- which remains ensconced as the ruling party -- was a member in good standing of the Socialist International, which was founded by Karl Marx.

Given the pedigree of this junta, we shouldn't be surprised to learn that it has a long and amicable relationship with the despotic dynasty ruling North Korea. Decades ago, as head of the air force, the future Arab dictator arranged for his pilots to receive training from North Korean advisers in preparation for a war against Israel. Pyongyang also supplied the country with Soviet-produced missiles and the know-how to produce its own. 

We're not discussing Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, or Iran  (which isn't an Arab country, of course). This is portrait of the Egyptian government headed by Hosni Mubarak and his hand-picked successor Omar Suleiman. That Arab socialist regime, we are insistently told by the Obama administration and various retread Cold War conservatives, is a flawed but valuable ally of the United States. 

Some of those singing that refrain has been performing cadenzas of alarm over the prospect of Cairo falling into the clutches of a dreadful "Islamo-Communist" alliance bent on creating a global Caliphate. The operatic variations on that theme performed by Glenn Beck have been worthy of  a coloratura soprano. 

By this reading, the uprising in Cairo is not a tribute to the irrepressible human desire for freedom. Instead, the brave defiance offered by hundreds of thousands of Egyptians was orchestrated as part of an elaborate plot to undermine the "stability" provided by Mubarak's U.S.-subsidized torture state.

Difficult as it may be to believe, Glenn Beck's take on this issue qualifies only for a silver medal in the silliness sweepstakes. First place goes to this unfathomably foolish essay, with shares equally apportioned to the young man who wrote it and the purported adults on the editorial staff of the journal that published it.

Exporting repression: An American-made tear gas grenade in Cairo.

Elaborating on Beck's rococo conspiracy theory, the author insists that the uprising against Mubarak is the work of an "Islamo-Leninist" alliance that he describes as the modern successor to "the Soviet-backed Nasser."

Actually, Nasser's successor is the Soviet-trained Hosni Mubarak, who heads a party that grew directly out of Nasser's Arab Socialist Union. It should also be pointed out that the Muslim Brotherhood was a CIA-supported enemy of Nasser. 

"While Hosni Mubarak may not share American hopes and conceptions of what constitutes a democratic government," the author continues, "he has been an ally of the United States and Israel, and has attempted to institute as many free-market reforms as possible...." For this reason, "our government understands the necessity of supporting Mubarak, whom even Former Vice President Dick Cheney has identified as an ally."

Oh, you mean Mubarak and his torturers have earned the Darth Cheney Seal of Approval? I guess that settles it, then. 

For those who stubbornly remain unpersuaded, the writer deploys the heaviest artillery at his disposal:

It's a Communist plot! Egyptian Muslims and Christians unite against tyranny.

"Our support for Mubarak is a direct application of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine, named after Reagan advisor Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who differentiated authoritarian governments (such as Mubarak’s Egypt and Pinochet’s Chile) from totalitarian regimes, such as the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, and stressed the need to support authoritarian governments as strategic partners against hostile regimes and movements, such as Islamism and Communism."

Referring to criticism of Glenn Beck by Weekly Standard publisher William Kristol, the author laments:  "It is a sad and shameful day when a self-identified `conservative' betrays the Kirkpatrick Doctrine and the long-term strategic interests of the United States in favor of what most likely amounts to a desperate attempt for publicity and attention from a political movement in which he is now obsolete."
 

Apparently we are to believe that the Kirkpatrick Doctrine was a divinely revealed codicil to the Decalogue, or at least a secret annex to the U.S. Constitution authorizing open-ended military and economic support for any despot who is baptized a "strategic partner" by our rulers.

Actually, that doctrine was actually spawned in the Trotskyite slums of academia in the late 1960s, before being articulated by Kirkpatrick in an essay that could be considered an Ur-text of neo-con imperialism. It is treated as holy writ by those who believe America has been anointed by History to propagate democracy at gunpoint throughout the globe. Those on the receiving end of the Empire's ministrations understandable consider it to be demonic rather than divine. 

The "Kirkpatrick Doctrine" as practiced in Cairo.

 The Kirkpatrick Doctrine was the direct mirror image of the Brezhnev Doctrine, under which Moscow claimed the supposed right to prop up and defend its own satrapies wherever they were threatened by "instability."

During the second Reagan term, Secretary of State George Schulz pronounced a corollary to the Kirkpatrick Doctrine under which Washington would actively promote anti-Soviet insurgencies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In other words, the U.S. would emulate another Soviet strategy by promoting "wars of national liberation."

Among the despots supported by Washington under the Kirkpatrick Doctrine was Saddam Hussein. Among the insurgents who received American help pursuant to the Schulz Corollary were the Afghan Mujahadeen -- the direct progenitors of the Afghan insurgents currently doing battle with American occupation troops. For the past decade, U.S. foreign policy has been an exercise in dealing with Kirkpatrick Doctrine-related blowback.

Defenders of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine will indignantly insist that I am guilty of "moral equivalence" by comparing it to the Brezhnev Doctrine. A good and sufficient reply is to point out that those doctrines directly intersect in Egypt, where -- according to the author quoted above, and many others of his ilk -- America has a moral duty and strategic imperative to support the socialist torture regime of Soviet-trained, North Korean-allied Hosni Mubarak and Omar Suleiman.

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Tortured by Self-Pity: The Sociopathic Judge Jay Bybee

The pious torturer: Jay Bybee, with his family and then-AG John Ashcroft.

Of those in the dock at the Nuremberg War Tribunal, Franz Schlegelberger was considered the most sympathetic, writes historian Doug Linder. In fact, he was the model for the character of Ernst Janning, the penitent German jurist portrayed by the incomparable Burt Lancaster in Judgment at Nuremberg.

 ***

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From 1931-1942, Judge Schlegelberger worked in the German Ministry of Justice, which was intended to be the institutional guardian of the rule of law. After the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, Schlegelberger made one tentative effort to restrain executive power: He objected to a decree retroactively imposing the death penalty on those blamed for the Reichstag Fire. 

This was a violation of the ancient legal maxim nulla poena sine lege ("no punishment without law"), he complained. This was quite likely the last time Schlegelberger -- who joined the Nazi Party in 1938 --  would insist that anything other than the will of the Fuhrer was the supreme law.

In March 1940, Schlegelberger proposed an official policy requiring "that lawyers, like civil servants, be formally subject to release from their profession if they could no longer guarantee that they would at all times without reservation support the National Socialist state," recalls Eli Nathans in the Law and History Review. As Minister of Justice, Schlegelberger reiterated that demand in an extraordinary conference of German jurists and lawyers in April 1941. 

The first item on the agenda at that gathering, recalls German historian Ingo Muller in his book Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, was to hammer down any legal resistance to the Nazi Regime's T-4 euthanasia initiative, which would eventually kill over 170,000 Germans (and train key personnel for service in the death camps). 

"Schlegelberg acquainted the participants `with all the decisions of the Fuhrer,' so that `judges and public prosecutors would not cause grave damage to the legal system and the government by opposing measures they sincerely but mistakenly believe to be illegal, and would not place themselves in opposition to the will of the Fuhrer through no fault of their own,'" writes Muller. 

For reasons he never made clear, Schlegelberg resigned as Justice Minister in 1942. (One indirect consequence of that decision was the appointment of the deranged Ronald Freisler -- a fanatical Communist who became a "Beefsteak Nazi" -- brown on the outside, red in the middle -- to head the so-called People's Court, better known as the Blood Tribunal.) 

Although he never expressed contrition in terms akin to those used by his cinematic avatar Ernst Janning, Schlegelberger was perceived as a reluctant supporter of Hitler's rule and given a lenient sentence. From the available records it appears that Schlegelberger's most acute regrets dealt with what he experienced, rather than what he helped inflict on others.

The product of a pious Christian family, Schlegelberger was typical of the functionaries who implemented policies of torture and mass murder on behalf of the Nazi Regime. 

Those men "were not sadists or killers by nature," observed Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. This meant that some method had to be devised "to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering."

"The trick used by Himmler ... was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self," Arendt continued. "So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!"

There are some striking similarities between Schlegelberger, the self-pitying instrument of Hitler's will, and Judge Jay S. Bybee of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who played a key role in devising the Bush junta's torture policies. Both of them came from conservative religious backgrounds; both believed in unqualified obedience to established authority. 

And as Bybee's May 26 testimony before a closed-door meeting of the  House Judiciary Committee demonstrates, he -- like Schlegelberger -- has mastered Himmler's method of redirecting pity from the victims of state-authorized crimes to the perpetrators thereof.

Bybee -- described in a flattering profile as a pious man, a Sunday School teacher who established a household rule forbidding his children to hit each other -- signed off on a series of memos written by John C. Yoo that "authorized" the torture of detainees, as long as the methods used fell short of "organ failure, impairment of a bodily function, or even death." That standard, as we will shortly see, was meant as a suggested guideline, rather than a rule.

Although he told the House committee that certain degrading techniques employed by the CIA "were not authorized," the memos he and Yoo devised purported to offer legal shelter for a torturer in the employ of the president who killed a detainee. 

Furthermore, since Yoo -- who fleshed out the details on behalf of Bybee -- has claimed that the president can authorize the sexual torture of a detainee's child, it's difficult to take at face value Bybee's May 26 claim that forcing detainees to wear diapers and soil themselves somehow ran afoul of the torture guidelines he devised.

As the song says, Bybee wasn't a bad man -- just ambitious. He was appointed assistant Attorney General in charge of the "Justice" Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) on the understanding that he would receive a coveted judicial appointment if his performance pleased his boss, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.

For his part, Yoo had designs on Bybee's position, which -- although all but unknown to the public -- offers access to lucrative and powerful positions in both the government and major government-aligned private law firms.

Yoo dutifully devised specious arguments in favor of unlimited presidential "war powers," and Bybee eagerly gave them the OLC's imprimatur. As Judge Andrew Napolitano points out in his book Lies The Government Told You, this is exactly the opposite of how the OLC is supposed to function: "[T]he OLC is supposed to work as a check on the executive branch, representing a line of defense against unlawful executive activity."

The Bybee/Yoo view of presidential war powers was identical to that expressed by Schlegelberger. In an August 1, 2002 memo offering retroactive "authority" for the Bush regime's existing practice of torture, Bybee endorsed the claim that those who tortured a detainee to death on presidential orders were immune to prosecution. Permitting enforcement of anti-torture statutes in any way, he insisted, "would represent an infringement of the President's authority to conduct war."

Schlegelberger's work to institutionalize torture in the Third Reich displayed a hypocritical punctilio similar to that exhibited by Bybee. Muller points out that after defendants accused of "political" crimes began to display tell-tale signs of torture, the German Justice Ministry under Schlegelberger "legalized the terror, to such an extent that they even established a `standard club' to be used in beatings, so that torture would at least be regularized." 

Although torture of "normal" criminal defendants was still forbidden -- and punishable by a prison term -- Schlegelberger, like Bybee and Yoo, was willing to arrange a work-around on behalf of the Fuhrer's dutiful servants.

In 1941, Police Captain Wilhelm Klinzmann was convicted of torture for beating an arson confession out of a farm laborer named Robert Blodling. When the German Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of Klinzmann's sentence, Schlegelberger created a new procedure called "cancellation" that, in Muller's words, "gave the government a means to end every current investigation or trial independently of judicial decisions." Thus "Klintzmann was [set] free and was not even considered to have a criminal record." 

This practice of "cancellation" prefigured both the Bybee/Yoo doctrine of transcendent presidential war powers, and the Obama administration's de facto ratification of Bush-era torture in the interests of "closure" -- or, as the estimable Glenn Greenwald puts it, looking "forward" rather than "backward." 

In search of personal gain, Bybee and Yoo perverted the law in order to enable torture. They are therefore liable to prosecution under bribery statutes. At the very least, Bybee should face impeachment, since bribery is specifically mentioned in the Constitution as an impeachable offense.

 

"Cheer up -- Jay Bybee has it MUCH worse than you!"

Obviously, Jay Bybee has ample cause for remorse -- even leaving aside the fact that he enabled the torture of human beings, many of whom were (and are) completely innocent.

Yet when asked during the May 26 hearing if he had any regrets, Bybee displayed what Glenn Greenwald correctly describes as "sociopathic self-absorption." 

According to the New York Times, Bybee described himself as "proud" of the suborned memos he signed at the OLC,  insisting that they were "well researched” and "very carefully written."

"Still, he said the controversy surrounding his tenure there had been difficult," observed the Times:

"`I have regrets because of the notoriety that this has brought me,' he said. `It has imposed enormous pressures on me both professionally and personally. It has had an impact on my family. And I regret that, as a result of my government service, that that kind of attention has been visited on me and on my family.'"

 

Weep not for those drowned, beaten, blinded, suffocated, subjected to genital mutilation, and murdered because of policies Bybee crafted in the service of fuhrerprinzip and his own ambition. Spare your tears instead for Bybee himself, who -- despite a lucrative, life-tenure judicial position -- suffers profoundly as a result of being criticized for the pivotal role he played in institutionalizing such barbarism.

Himmler would recognize, and most likely admire, the ease with which Bybee has mastered the Nazi tactic of moral displacement. And Franz Schlegelberger may be driven to envy by the fact that his contemporary American counterpart found himself on the bench, rather than behind bars. 

(N.B. -- I'm constrained to observe that the Nuremberg Tribunal, as the heroic Robert Taft pointed out, was a corrupt and cynical exercise in victor's "justice." That body's lack of legitimacy in no way mitigates the crimes committed by the likes of Franz Schlegelberger.)

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