Certiorari Denied: Remembering the Roberts Court's Shameful Abandonment of Torture Victims

This piece by Dorothy Samuels, a "senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University school of Law," certainly resonates with me!  In it she enumerates three cases of US conducted torture of detainees, one a US citizen, where the US Supreme Court refused to review the cases.  Check out her concluding two paragraphs:

"The Bush White House disgraced itself by authorizing torture and failing to comply with constitutional limits and Congress disgraced itself by allowing it. But, as Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU says, "the signal failure at this point is the failure of courts to enforce those limits."

"In swatting away the appeals of torture victims with serial denials of review, the Roberts Court abdicated it crucial oversight role envisioned by the Constitution, further harmed America's reputation around the world and shut off one of the last remaining avenues for accountability."

The sad fact is that the Bush administration, operating directly from the office of the president and vice president, authorized torture in violation of international law and federal criminal statutes. The US Supreme Court did nothing about it, even when presented with an opportunity to grant torture victims the right to seek redress against the government. This is the essence of impunity.

The Bush Administration's torture policies are one of the principal reasons I became a Democrat. The defining moment for me came when I was representing a Tamil from Sri Lanka who had fled persecution and torture in his own country.  

This was during the period when Rumsfeld was advocating "enhanced interrogation techniques" that were "torture" by any common sense and legal definition of the term.

It quite a shock for me when I realized, while preparing an immigration court submission, that the Sri Lankan Government conduct I was claiming made my client a torture victim was less painful and injurious than what the United States Government was doing to its detainees.

For me there was no going back after that.