Goldsmith's New Book Justifies Rendition

Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith during his tenure as head of the Justice department's Office of Legal Counsel(OLC), authored a March 19, 2004, memo approving the transfer of prisoners from Iraq to other countries for interrogation, according to dean Lawrence Velvel of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

The memo "was used to facilitate the ghost detainee program in which various prisoners were hidden from the International Red Cross so that nobody would learn that they were prisoners, and contrary to the Geneva Conventions their status, health and whereabouts were not disclosed to their families," Velvel wrote.

Up to a dozen prisoners were removed from Iraq and rendered to secret CIA prisons were they were tortured, Velvel writes on his blog VelvelOnNationalAffairs.com (Oct. 12, 2007).

Velvel said the transfer memo "seems to contain not a single word" about who the transferees will be and where they will be taken, which "any good lawyer, who is not bent on facilitating illegality or misconduct" would seek to learn when asked for a legal opinion.

Goldsmith's admission that he read a secret memo of August 1, 2002 that spelled out specific CIA interrogation techniques "makes it flatly impossible that he did not know or suspect what was going on when he wrote the transfer memo," Velvel pointed out.

In his new book "The Terror Presidency"(TP), Goldsmith writes he never finalized the draft (transfer memo) and that it "could not have been relied upon to abuse anyone, not only because it was never finalized, but more importantly because it stated that the suspect's Geneva Convention protections must travel with him outside Iraq."

On the contrary, Velvel writes, the memo didn't deal with which types of interrogation were legal but rather only with the legality of transferring prisoners out of Iraq. What's more, while Goldsmith claimed a suspect's Geneva Convention protection "must travel with him" he neglected to mention, according to Velvel, that non-Iraqis who entered Iraq after the U.S. occupation, according to the U.S. had no Geneva Convention rights and, as Velvel put it, "You cannot be followed by protections that do not exist."

Goldsmith defends himself by writing renditions had to be "temporary" or "brief" but he never defined their length. In the context of a lifetime, Velvel wrote, this could mean three months to a year, long enough to torture a prisoner into talking.

Goldsmith also wrote even if a person "is strongly suspected of committing an offense," detaining him for questioning does not make him an accused person who is not transferable. By not accusing the suspect in any formal way, Goldsmith said they could be transferred out of Iraq. Velvel resonds "our government had already accused them and convicted them in every way but sideways." Velvel pointed out such men deliberately would not have any judicial proceedings brought against them "until after they had been tortured for long periods."

Velvel said Goldsmith's exculpatory comments need to be viewed in light of his own written admission that he lied outright to a New York Times reporter about the secret NSA spying program.

Goldstein's book, Velvel said, raises the issue of "whether lawyers, in order to justify and provide a basis supporting vicious and illegal actions of the government, are free to assert the most outlandish arguments in favor of the actions, are free to invent astonishing, even evil, arguments in favor of the positions, are free to facilitate the government's evil actions and not to counsel against the positions even though the positions and actions are in violation of domestic criminal laws, in violation of international law, contrary to the American constitutional system, and taken without consideration of the traditions and values of this country."

Lawyers who support and/or cover a client's illegal conduct, Velvel said, should be subject to disbarment and criminal prosecution "and disqualified from being on any respectable law school faculty."

Velvel said Goldsmith knew first-hand of the wrongdoing of the Bush administration but after departing OLC waited to disclose it for three years until publication of his book, revealing him as "an enabler of evil, including evil and crime justified by the tortured rationalizations of lawyers who set out to provide legal cover for torture, for cruelly inhuman conduct and other horrors."

(Further Information: Contact Dean Lawrence Velvel at velvel@mslaw.edu or Jeff Demers, Massachusetts School of Law, (978) 681-0800, Sherwood Ross Associates, 305-205-8281.)

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