Judge Jay Bybee is lying. OK, that may not be extremely fair, but it got your attention, didn't it? The truth is that we don't know if Bybee's lying about writing a memo -- as then-assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel -- affirming the legality of the torture of suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah. He may just be negligent. We'll have to wait and see. As is usually the case with a Bush administration scandal, we have to assume that the person at the center of it is either lying or incompetent.The memo listed ten methods of "harsh interrogation" that could be used against Zubaydah -- including slapping, "cramped confinement," stress positions, sleep deprivation, "insects placed in a confinement box," and waterboarding. The techniques would be used "in some sort of an escalating fashion, culminating with the waterboard, though not necessarily ending with this technique." When this memo was released by the Obama administration, life got a little complicated for Judge Jay Bybee. There is now a serious movement to impeach him and remove him from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
But Bybee got some friends together to tell the Washington Post the he "regrets" signing the memo -- not writing it, mind you, but signing it. See, he didn't write this memo, he says. He just signed it. Any legal scholar will tell you that signing something doesn't mean anything -- it's just something you do. It's not like signing a document means you're in agreement with it, it just means someone pointed to a blank space and said, "sign here," which you did like a good little monkey. That's why you can break your lease at any moment -- you just signed the lease, you didn't write it, so it doesn't mean crap. You aren't responsible for anything in that lease... [CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
