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The primary argument against prosecutions for Bush officials who ordered torture is that DOJ lawyers told the White House that these tactics were legal, and White House officials therefore had the right to rely on those legal opinions. The premise is that White House officials inquired in good faith with the DOJ about what they could and could not do under the law, and only ordered those tactics which the DOJ lawyers told them were legal. As these Comey emails prove, that simply is not what happened.
The DOJ torture-authorizing memos are perfectly analogous to the CIA’s pre-war intelligence reports about Iraq’s WMDs. Bush officials justify their pre-war statements about WMDs by pointing to the CIA’s reports — as though those reports just magically appeared on their desks from the CIA — when, as is well documented, Dick Cheney and friends were continuously pressuring and cajoling the CIA to give them those threat reports in order to supply bureaucratic justification for the attack on Iraq. That is exactly how the DOJ torture-authorizing memos came to be: Dick Cheney, David Addington and George Bush himself continuously exerted extreme pressure on DOJ lawyers to produce memos authorizing them to do what they wanted to do — not because they were interested in knowing in good faith what the law did and did not allow, but because they wanted DOJ memos as cover — legal immunity — for the torture they had already ordered and were continuing to order. Though one won’t find this in the NYT article, that is, far and away, the most important revelation from the Comey emails.
”What the new Jim Comey torture emails actually reveal - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com (via ayse)
