White House Fool Report: Ugh, lawyers

Barrel pillory, from Deadly Planet.

Hey Mr. President, you wouldn't be airing out the linens and dusting up the old black sites and revving up the racks and thumbscrews for a spin, by any chance? Because Charlie Savage is reporting in the Times that

President Obama’s legal team is debating whether to back away from his earlier view [on the United Nations Convention against Torture]. It is considering reaffirming the Bush administration’s position that the treaty imposes no legal obligation on the United States to bar cruelty outside its borders, according to officials who discussed the deliberations on the condition of anonymity.

Really? Why would this be? If you don't want to be obliged to bar cruelty outside the US borders, doesn't that kind of suggest that you would like a chance of some kind to not bar it? Because the Bush administration position, if I recall correctly, was pretty much that they didn't want their hands tied, while they liked to have other people, generally foreigners in undisclosed locations outside US territory, tied up all over.

Well, no, of course not, I'm sure that's not it, and so is Charlie, as he acknowledges: It's just that

military and intelligence lawyers are said to oppose accepting that the treaty imposes legal obligations on the United States’ actions abroad. They say they need more time to study whether it would have operational impacts.

Although what the operational impacts might be—why it could be inconvenient to bar cruelty if you don't want to practice cruelty—is a little unclear to the layperson. Anybody who's ever met an attorney of a certain type is familiar with the rest of it, though:

They have also raised concerns that current or future wartime detainees abroad might invoke the treaty to sue American officials with claims of torture...

Because it's much worse to be sued than it is to have a billion people around the world and in your country convinced that you want to torture them. God forbid you should ever be sued, even though, as Savage points out, every lawsuit brought by a Bush-era detainee against his torturers has been thrown out of court, not to mention lawsuits against those who did not actually torture anybody. God forbid the United States should become a party to the International Criminal Court and its government officers become subject to judgment just like an ordinary unexceptional country, and God forbid any US official should ever be sued for anything, because why?

Because there are too many lawyers in the White House, that's why. You should have a little faith that if you don't do anything wrong you won't get busted. That's what you expect all of us to do in our Internet and telephone interactions, isn't it? Sorry, I promised I wasn't going to get into that.

Sure enough, here they come:

@bmaz AKA, "I wonder where we're torturing that Obama's worried about?"
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) October 19, 2014

I don't believe you want to torture anybody. I believe you meant what you said as a Senator and thereafter on the subject. But not everybody does. There are a lot of people, many with very loud voices, both in the Muslim world and in the libertarian/anarchist ether, and lots of them really smart people too, who are convinced that you are absolutely drooling to torture. I do not understand why you allow a squadron of lawyers to make you look as if those accusers are right.