Don’t we all hate lawyers?  One hundred lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?  A good start?  Shakespeare was the radical who advocated the killing of them.

Want to know who to blame for the ills of society today?  It’s those damned lawyers who take on cases that seek to blame others for the acts of their clients.  Spill some hot coffee trying to balance the cup in your lap?  No problem – - it’s McDonald’s fault for making the coffee hot.

Want to know who’s to blame for this whole torture brouhaha!  That’s right, it’s the damned lawyers.  The tortuous legal arguments and wordsmith acrobatics of the lawyers in the Bush White House opined that water boarding was not torture because it did not simulate death.

The precedent behind that opinion?  The recognition that water boarding was death simulating torture. If you think that sounds silly, or is made up, read on.

“The victim may be immersed in water, have water forced into the nose and mouth, or have water poured onto material placed over the face so that the liquid is inhaled or swallowed. The media usually characterize the practice as ’simulated drowning.’ That’s incorrect. To be effective, water boarding is usually real drowning that simulates death.”

Those words come from the writing of a former Judge Advocate General, Evan Wallach.  They were written in November of 2007, and published in the Washington Post. Mr. Wallach is presently a judge at the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York, and teaches the law of war as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Law School and New York Law School.

Our government is very familiar with water boarding, and in the past has prosecuted and convicted people of using the technique.  The Tokyo War Crimes Trials charged and convicted Japanese military and government officials of war crimes, including torture.  The primary evidence used against them was testimony on their practices of what we now refer to as water boarding.

American courts have seen several legal actions on the subject of water boarding, also.  Cases include claims by Filipinos in actions against the estate of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, and a 1983 case in Texas against a sheriff and three of his deputies of forcing confessions by the use of what we today call water boarding.

The sheriff received a ten year sentence for his part as the one who allowed the torture, the one on whose desk the buck stopped.  Interesting.

Yet, here we are twenty six years later, and lawyers are using all their wily skills to find circuitous routes around what would appear on their faces as cases directly on point, four square on the proposition that water boarding is torture.  More importantly, though, that water boarding is a crime.

Those for whom the legal opinions were written, the ones who made the decisions, the ones responsible for permitting the torture of water boarding, now hide behind them.  Actions are defended on the basis of a lawyer’s opinion in hand, the force field around them that deflects the photon torpedoes of public scrutiny.

The debate is not about whether torture is a crime, or that water boarding is torture.  Those questions have been answered already.  Nor is it about whether the use of torture was successful or that actionable intelligence was gathered by its use.

The debate is about whether we are a country that will accept responsibility for its actions.  We’re hiding behind written legal opinions of dubious worth that seem to make distinctions without differences on the subject of torture, and we’re saying the ends justify the means.

So, if you want to know who to blame for this torture thing, it’s the damned lawyers.  Get rid of them and we get rid of the torture issue.  Case closed.