Lefty prof tortures reason

Reason obeys itself: ignorance submits to what is dictated to it.

~ Thomas Paine

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and a member of USA Today’s board of contributors. Turley is a media doyen and perhaps one of the most singular voices against America’s so-called “torture” policy of enemy combatants and Muslim fanatics imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Turley’s one-man crusade against “torture” in my view has little to do with sober legal reasoning, but in essence tortured reason, common sense and America’s judicial traditions regarding prisoners of war going back over 400 years to common-law times. Turley not only accuses former President George W. Bush of multiple war crimes for the torture of Muslim terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, but makes a critical point in an interview on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC – namely, “that the moral burden of torture is on the backs of each one of us until these people are brought to justice. And it will be profoundly immoral to let them go.”

Turley further states:

We have Third World countries that when they have found that their leaders committed torture war crimes, they prosecuted them. But the most successful democracy in history … [does] nothing about it. And that’s an indictment not just of George Bush and his administration. It’s the indictment of all of us if we walk away from a clear war crime and say it’s time for another commission.

Liberal and secular law academics like Turley and his compatriots in the Democrat Party and in groups like the ACLU and CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) seem not to understand that the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 has made it clear that the “enemy combatant” class of war criminals have none of the liberal protections of regular prisoners of war, let alone access to full constitutional rights enjoyed by every American citizen – yet Turley continues his rants against George Bush and his so-called crimes against humanity for torturing innocent people imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.

That professor Turley is a respected lawyer and scholar of constitutional law makes his legal views on torture particularly outrageous. Note the landmark United States Supreme Court decision Rasul v. Bush (2004), where the majority established that the U.S. court system has the authority to decide whether foreign nationals (non-U.S. citizens) held in Guantanamo Bay were wrongfully imprisoned. Also, the 2008 Supreme Court decisions in the Boumediene and Al-Odah cases, which now gives full constitutional rights to enemy combatants, has set the stage for the Justice Department to be forced to free many if not all of the 300-plus irredeemable foreign combatants. If this is done, the America public will be extremely endangered. The war on terrorism will suffer irreparable harm.

Reason obeys itself: ignorance submits to what is dictated to it.~ Thomas Paine

Turley further states:

We have Third World countries that when they have found that their leaders committed torture war crimes, they prosecuted them. But the most successful democracy in history … [does] nothing about it. And that’s an indictment not just of George Bush and his administration. It’s the indictment of all of us if we walk away from a clear war crime and say it’s time for another commission.

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Ellis Washington, currently a professor of law and political science at Savannah State University, former editor at the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). See his law review article “Reply to Judge Richard Posner.” Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”
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