Salon: Trust Us (Did the U.S. intentionally mislead the court?)

[kskiska]

Defending the administration's enemy-combatant policy, the Justice Department told the Supreme Court that the U.S. doesn't torture prisoners. Just hours later, the Abu Ghraib story broke. Did the U.S. intentionally mislead the court?

Just after 10 o'clock on the morning of April 28, a Justice Department attorney representing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared before the Supreme Court to argue that the Bush administration is free to imprison a U.S. citizen for as long as it likes -- without a lawyer, without a hearing, without any contact with the outside world -- based solely on the president's determination that the citizen is an "enemy combatant" in the war on terror.

When skeptical justices asked about the risk that a detainee might be abused while in custody, Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement told them they must "trust the executive to make the kind of quintessential military judgments that are involved in things like that." The government's interrogators understand that information obtained through coercion may be unreliable, Clement said, and they know that "the last thing you want to do is torture somebody or try to do something along those lines."

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that some governments engage in "mild torture" to obtain information, Clement shot back: "Well, our executive doesn't."

By the end of the day, the world had seen evidence to the contrary.

more…
http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/05/17/trust/index.html

[teryang]

1. Knowledge of the principal is imputed

...to its agent. The party in interest is the executive branch. The courts ire at the intentional misrepresentation of their excesses will not depend on whether their attorney can feign lack of knowledge.
It is about checks and balances, no one should have to trust the executive to do anything except err and over-reach.

These two cases are so important because the notion that humans can be stripped of their civil rights based upon suspicion of sabatoge or treason is a fundamentally fascist one, used to justify unchecked arbitrary and total power.

If the Supreme Court doesn't do something about this, the republic is finished.