May 6, 2009

Center for Constitutional Rights President: Coverup of Anti-Torture Memo Is Bad News for Bushies

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I just got off the phone with Columbia Law School professor Michael Ratner, who is also the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a human rights nonprofit. Ratner read our story this morning about Philip Zelikow’s allegations that Dick Cheney’s office may have “collected and destroyed” an anti-torture memo Zelikow wrote in 2005. Any such coverup could present a significant problem for the defense in any potential torture trial targeting Bush administration officials, Ratner says:

If this memo’s out there, an important part of it goes towards mens rea, which is a guilty mind. A lot of the question here is did they know [torture] was wrong, did they know it was criminal. If they suppressed opposite opinions, that’s some indication that they had guilty minds. If there were memos that were intentionally suppressed, it would be one of the elements that go towards a conviction.

Ratner says that if Zelikow’s anti-torture memo was suppressed, it probably wasn’t just because Bush White House bureaucrats wanted to ignore opinions they disagreed with:

I think they wanted a clean slate so they could later say that our legal conclusions were reasonable and they were made in good faith. [A coverup] undercuts that… It undercuts the lawyers’ defense that this was in good faith and objectively reasonable and it also puts out there that there’s an alternative view of the legality of [torture].

It remains unclear what actually happened. Ratner says the smart legal move would probably have been to ignore Zelikow’s memo rather than trying and failing to suppress it, Ratner says: “The suppression of it stings more because it indicates that they didn’t want to know.”

More on this as it develops.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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