The Undying Evil of the Last Bush Administration

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

04 October 15

There are generous rewards for justifying torture.

oday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals out in California cut the NCAA a big break in its decision regarding the lower court's ruling in O'Bannon v. NCAA, the landmark case that seemed to open the door to a just form of compensation for the people in college athletics who do the actual work. It upheld the ruling, but it also eviscerated the process designed by the lower court to put its decision into actual practice, adopting instead the hilariously insane argument promulgated by the NCAA that the image of its athletic programs will suffer if the athletes are compensated to the point where the market value of college sports will be diminished. 

However, what interested us here at this shebeen was the identity of the appeals court judge who wrote the decision. That would be Jay S. Bybee who, during his days as an assistant attorney general during the late Avignon Presidency, wrote the famous memo justifying the use of waterboarding as a technique of "enhanced interrogation." As a reward for being such a very good German, Bybee got a lifetime sinecure on the bench, where his sweet-tooth for authoritarian inhumanity can be regularly indulged.

This is how a federal appellate judge, who once wrote memos which justified the torture of terror detainees and the need to immunize officials who engaged in the torture, came to conclude as a matter of law that a man shacked at his wrists and shackled by his ankles to his bed, without a mattress, in a cell lit continuously for seven days, who was forced to eat his food like a dog because of his shackles, did not have a constitutional right to present the evidence of this confinement to a jury.

The evil of that administration is positively undying. It will poison this country for centuries. Ed O'Bannon's lucky he's not hanging by his thumbs from a dungeon wall.