We recently reported on the absurd irony of the Bush DOJ’s prosecution of Charles “Chuckie” Taylor for acts of torture committed in Liberia. Since then, the irony has become a little bit thicker.
Taylor was born in Massachusetts but moved to Liberia in 1997 when his father, a nefarious former warlord, was elected president. Once there, “Chuckie” served his father’s regime by heading the Liberian Anti-Terrorist Unit — an organization known as the “Demon Forces” that essentially protected the Taylor regime from its internal enemies. The appropriately named Demon Forces frequently tortured their victims with a variety of methods including hot irons, hot wax, knives, and electric shocks — behavior that clearly runs counter to Article One of the UN Convention Against Torture.
As we reported earlier, Taylor is being prosecuted under a US law — an extraterritorial statute that allows the prosecution of citizens of any country within US courts for acts of torture committed anywhere on the globe. Taylor’s prosecution is the first one under this law since its passage in 1994.
The perverse irony emerging from this situation is that we have the Bush Department of Justice prosecuting a man for acts of torture committed in a foreign country. This is, after all, the very same DOJ that issued a series of secret opinions declaring, essentially, that torture really wasn’t torture so long as the president orders it and then continued to perform “harsh interrogations” on individuals in a variety of facilities strung across the globe. (The whole unbelievable backstory on this secret legal maneuvering may be read in the excellent reporting of NY Times reporters Shane, Johnston, and Risen in an article entitled “Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations.”) These secret judgments allowed the DOJ to publicly state that the United States found torture “abhorrent” while privately authorizing and continuing the very same behavior that existed before their outrageous torture memos were leaked to the press.
All that would be bad enough as it is. But now, in a move that renders impotent all currently available metrics for the measurement of chutzpah, the Bush DOJ has decided that they have the standing to try and convict others for torture.
Yesterday they succeeded. Charles Taylor, Jr. was sentenced to 97 years in prison by a federal judge in Miami.
And while I’m sure he deserved it, many others here do as well.