"I was only following the advice of government lawyers"

[kpete]

Superficially, at least, this new excuse of "I was only following the advice of government lawyers" appears to be different. There isn't the same conflict between social pressure of obedience to authority and adherence to basic moral or legal norms. Rather than potentially illegal orders from a political or military authority figure, we have advice from a legal authority that the previous orders are not, in fact, illegal after all. Even if they appear illegal or immoral, one is advised that they are not. Doesn't this change things?

Not in the least.

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If a Nazi concentration camp guard had supplemented his defense of "I was only following orders" with "...and those orders were declared officially legal by government lawyers," do you really think that the Nuremburg war crimes tribunal would have accepted this as a legitimate legal argument and let him go? Of course not. It changes nothing when a government lawyer falsely claims that illegal orders are legal — and that's before we take into consideration the fact that the German legal system had been subverted to make it complicit in Nazi crimes.

In Nazi Germany, all lawyers had to swear a personal loyalty oath to Adolf Hitler, and even defense lawyers were expected to put the interests of the state and Volk ahead of the interests of their clients. Naturally no one in the Justice Ministry would have dared issue a legal opinion that any policies of the Nazi government were illegal — and that's assuming that anyone there would have genuinely believed it, which is doubtful. America may not be Nazi Germany, but the underlying principle applies: government lawyers whose jobs depend on the same administration whose policies they are legally evaluating may not always be independent enough to be trusted to give accurate legal advice. They may be pressured or ideologically committed to defending the administration's policies regardless of law or morality.

What we now have, then, is a president who not only feels free to ignore laws when he sees fit, but who has assumed the authority to say that there shall be no judicial review of any administration actions if an administration lawyer has said that those actions are legal. This effectively invests all power in one branch of the government — and thus in one person — because it eliminates realistic checks and balances with the other two branches. It's little wonder that Mukasey's testimony has been deemed a declaration of tyranny. Because it's thus far only been exercised as a "soft" tyranny, with few obvious consequences for individual lives, it's something that can grow and develop until it can't be easily stopped.

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more at:
http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2008/02/our-french-president-wherever-he-goes.html

[0007]

1. Excellent point of view!

[L. Coyote]

2. Bush: "I was following the advice of lawyers I command and appoint"

doing what I told them to allow me to do :rofl: so don't blame Dick or me if I'm a war criminal!

[The Backlash Cometh]

3. Ha, ha, ha. The truth finally comes out.

I said it a long time ago, it's the city attorneys who are enabling people to use bad judgment. And they're just giving clients what they want to hear.

[L. Coyote]

4. There is one American who cannot say, "Befehl ist Befehl" The Executive Resident, the Decider.

Nuremberg Defense - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Nuremberg Defense is a legal defense that essentially states that the defendant was "only following orders" ("Befehl ist Befehl") and is therefore not ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Defense