Worthless argument

I concur. I wonder if W actually chose these people or if they were forced on him by the Party.

Right. Condy was not AG, but she has had an impressive education in respectable institutions.

* 1981: PhD, Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver. 1975: MA, University of Notre Dame. 1974: BA cum laude in political science, University of Denver.
* 1993 to 1 July 1999: Provost of Stanford University. Professor of political science, Stanford. Senior fellow of the Institute for International Studies. Fellow of the Hoover Institution. Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

A court would certainly take the view that she should have known better than to make that statement. Incredibly, she made it after a speech while responding to questions at a university.
Cheney was a Yale drop out who later majored in Arts and Polysci at the University of Wyoming. He had scored two DUI arrests by the age of 22.

Rummy was a Princeton man on an ROTC scholarship. He later dropped out of Law at Georgetown.

Ashcroft fits your profile better as an AOG fundamentalist, but he attended Yale and Uni of Chicago Law School and was a draft dodger.

So they all could claim a reasonable education and have no excuse for ignorance.

This is a rather shocking read drawing uncomfortable parallels with the Gestapo.

Apparently, in 1947 the USA took the view that German soldiers should have refused to obey unlawful orders requiring them to commit war crimes, even though they claimed that refusing would have meant an instant firing squad for mutiny – which was highly probable in that army. They also knew that the people we expected them to protect (Norwegian insurgents) would certainly have been harmed anyway regardless of whether the soldiers followed the illegal order.

That is an incredibly high standard to hold anyone to, but I presume that they did not receive the death penalty from us.
Thinking about all the implications of the Bush Administration behavior, I believe that an investigation, charges and a trial are the only way to go for every elected and appointed official and key government senior executive involved in these shameful acts. I can’t see any justification for excluding any of the senior figures because they are the most culpable right up to W himself. If he is punished it will go along way towards atonement for the good name of the USA. This would be an appropriate matter for the war crimes tribunal at den Hague, but the USA could never let an external entity force us to punish the President so we have to do it ourselves.

If you think about the biased Starr Special Commission faced by Clinton for a relatively trivial matter and while he was in office, this does not seem to be unreasonable given the high standards apparently expected by Republicans.

As an aside, I note that in Roman Republic times it was quite normal for recent former consuls, provincial governors and magistrates to be prosecuted for crimes that they had committed while in office. The knowledge that this would happen helped to keep them honest, and to keep good records.

I do not support capital punishment under any circumstances, but I think that, for those found guilty of these torture crimes in the name of the USA, some serious time in a federal prison would be appropriate. The Prosecution should be a transparent process on show to the world because their crimes were also like that. We must send the message to our future leaders that these actions were abhorrent to the American people and will never, ever, be tolerated again.