A couple of things caught my eye in the LA Times this morning. First off, from an article by Greg Miller and Julian E. Barnes:

The Senate report indicated that then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and other officials gave the CIA’s interrogation plan political backing even before the methods had been approved by the Justice Department.

This is one thing that confuses me about the torture memo discussions. There’s been a lot of outrage at the lawyers who wrote the memos – John Yoo & Jay Bybee. But I don’t see why the lawyers would write those memos unless someone was asking them to. It’s not like Yoo and Bybee had forged their careers as staunch torture supporters. Clearly, someone said to them, “we’d like to use these ‘interrogation methods’ and we’d like you to figure out how we can do so legally.” So, sure, every man is responsible for his own actions, and Yoo & Bybee didn’t have to go along with it. But they aren’t the only ones responsible, and I feel like the press has been really timid about coming to that obvious conclusion.

And I don’t object to prosecuting them for being pussies. They made bad choices. But I really don’t know how we can even have this national discussion without addressing the larger issue, which is that they were working to fulfill someone’s agenda.

Right next to that article was another one entitled “Prosecuting ‘torture memo’ authors called ‘a real stretch’.” Headlines like that always get my attention, because they make a point of view sound like a fact. So here’s what we get:

“It would be a real stretch. As long as they thought they were honestly interpreting the [anti-torture] law, they are not criminal conspirators,” said Stephen A. Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University and a former prosecutor. “They may be bad lawyers who gave extremely bad advice,” he said, but that is not a crime.

Okay. So Stephen A. Saltzburg calls it a real stretch. And I understand his logic, although it does assume that there was no motive behind their decisions. So who else says it’s a ‘real stretch’?

Three Senate Republicans, led by John McCain of Arizona, sent President Obama a letter Wednesday strongly urging him to steer clear of criminal prosecutions of Bush’s lawyers. “Providing poor legal advice is always undesirable,” the letter said, “but that is quite a different matter from making legal advice with which we disagree into a crime.”

John McCain? That’s their ace in the hole? Oh wait, there’s one more:

Most criminal-law experts said they were uncomfortable with the idea of prosecuting lawyers over memos.

Ohhhhhh. “Most criminal-law experts.” Because the authors of this article talked to all criminal-law experts, and found that most of them agreed.

The annoying thing about this article is that the focus is on how no one should get in trouble for writing the torture memos, but the interesting part of the article, the part that’s actually worthy of discussion, is slipped in at the end:

Saltzburg and others said Americans would probably be inclined to bring war crimes charges against a former official who authorized the waterboarding of a U.S. agent.

“I admit I feel hypocritical about that,” he said. “If one of our soldiers or CIA agents had been captured by Saddam [Hussein], waterboarded and put in box, and we found out who authorized it, we would insist on prosecuting that person for war crimes.”

Malinowski said there would be a legal consensus in favor of a war crimes prosecution if a American had been waterboarded by Iran, Iraq or North Korea.

“There would be no controversy, no debate,” he said. “We would seek to prosecute any foreign official who authorized the commission of those acts on an American. And no one would buy the excuse that one of those dictators was relying on the advice of his legal counsel.”

Exactly. How different would the article read if the headline was “Experts say American war criminals get preferential treatment”?

And finally, in a section I like to call the Tyson Chaser … there’s a new documentary out about Mike Tyson that sounds fascinating. In it, he makes a comment that I’m immediately going to incorporate into everyday usage. He’s talking about how he can’t put himself in the situation in which he might be tempted to buy crack or get a prostitute, and he says:

“I don’t know what I might do, so that’s why I don’t put myself in that situation. I can’t say I’m some 100% cured of drinking or drugs. I don’t put myself in that situation. The urges are bad enough. If you hang out in the barbershop long enough, you’re gonna get a haircut.“

Awesome.