They Knew It Was Illegal

Click here to access article by John Sifton from Just Security.

...the most important revelation in the report [Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture] is not about the torture itself but rather about the legal culpability of the CIA. The report contains a key passage on page 33 revealing that senior lawyers at the CIA in mid 2002, at the very beginning of the CIA’s program, drafted a letter to the Attorney General in which it is expressly acknowledged that the interrogation tactics that came to be known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” violated the US torture statute. The draft letter requested that the Attorney General provide the CIA with “a formal declination of prosecution, in advance”—basically, a promise not to prosecute, or immunity. The document was shared even with CIA interrogators involved in the nascent program. From the beginning, in other words, key CIA officials were well aware that these techniques were clearly unlawful.

People need to understand that in any class-structured society, the ruling class is essentially above the law, unless a member (such as Bernie Madoff) does harm to other members of the ruling class. Of course, for public consumption they use any method they can to cover their law-breaking with some patina of legality such as a "formal declination of prosecution". In the end the prosecution of law-breakers only applies to us who lie below the ruling class; and the more below we lie, the more prosecution we experience. In other words, the "rule of law" only applies to us, the Ninety-Nine Percent, to insure that we behave according the laws of the ruling class.