Open Letter to Commenters at The Lex Files

Because the comments at Lex's blog at the Greensboro, NC News & Record don't seem to allow too many links, I've posted this to verify my response to commenters there. First the comments:

The government vigorously investigated and prosecuted Passaro to hold him responsible for his illegal personal acts. His actions were in direct violation of his contract, CIA standing orders, our government's policies, and the law. He was found guilty and I believe he deserved it.
Passaro was the problem, not the government. I doubt seriously that he was a perfectly normal person before going to work under contract to the government and then miraculously changed overnight because of his work for the government. If a city worker commits a crime while on duty we don't lynch the mayor. If we did, we'd have a new one every day!
Liberals have a nasty habit of holding no one personally responsible for their actions, instead blaming it all on "the government." I don't think the facts revealed in court during this case support that position here. Passaro was a bad apple, and our government firmly hauled him in to account for his crimes.

Posted by: jaycee at August 18, 2006 04:26 PM


The government vigorously investigated and prosecuted Passaro to hold him responsible for his illegal personal acts.
Riggsveda's point was that the prosecution actually wasn't all that vigorous.
Passaro was the problem, not the government.
Given the government's unseemly eagerness to torture, that statement is simply laughable.
Liberals have a nasty habit of holding no one personally responsible for their actions, instead blaming it all on "the government."
Talk about your non sequitur. Riggsveda was saying that the government AND Passaro should be held accountable, not that the government should be held accountable INSTEAD of Passaro. She also was saying that Passaro got off light.
And given your protestations in light of the fact that two federal courts have now pretty much accused the president directly of breaking U.S. (NSA case) and international (Hamdan case) law, your implication that only conservatives value "personal responsibility" is, to be polite, amusing.

Posted by: Lex at August 18, 2006 04:32 PM


Lex, to date NO CASE has been made that the US government ordered, condoned, or sanctioned any torture of any kind as defined by legal authority. NONE.
Each and every case has been proven to be an illegal act committed by an individual in disobeyance of his/her orders, policies, guidelines, and the law.
Again, if a sanitation worker commits a crime while at work, does that mean the city government is guilty of the crime or ordered the employee to commit it?
I'm sorry you hate our government, but don't blame it for the individual criminal acts of it's employees.

Posted by: jaycee at August 18, 2006 07:25 PM

Enough of this excuse-mongering. Even as Bush lied to our faces that "we don't do torture", he was establishing the groundwork for a methodic approach to detentions and interrogations that connected the FBI, CIA, and Armed Forces and became SOP. And putting untrained people in charge of detainees for questioning, and leaving prisoners at battle frontlines rather than immediately removing them as is required, was, if not a deliberate part of it, at least enabling by omission.

Don Rumsfeld not only knew about it, but signed off on the techniques.

Bush and Cheney used the legal contortions of John Bybee, Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo to get away with it. In fact, Bush was so innocent of knowledge that, as reported in Ron Suskind's The One Per Cent Doctrine, he asked eagerly about a briefer's torture report, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"

The memo of Alberto J. Mora, a conservative Republican and the outgoing general counsel of the United States Navy is even more damning:

Mora’s memo, however, shows that almost from the start of the Administration’s war on terror the White House, the Justice Department, and the Department of Defense, intent upon having greater flexibility, charted a legally questionable course despite sustained objections from some of its own lawyers.

These incidents are policy. They are not isolated, not unapproved, and for every one we find out about because it couldn’t be adequately concealed, there are probably hundreds more. Far from making the US safer, they do nothing but make more enemies for us, and at the same time, coarsen and harden us to any possibility of empathy or diplomacy. This is not the country I believe in. Making excuses for the men who are destroying it from the inside does not help us regain our morality. Calling them to account and stopping them from dragging us all down with them does not, in my books, mean hating one's country. On the contrary, it often seems the only ones left who truly do care about our nation are the ones willing to stand up to these power-mad maniacs who constantly pose as our saviors.