1115.org

Back in October 2007, Sen. Lindsey Graham drew on his personal expertise to declare:

I am convinced, as an individual senator, as a military lawyer for 25 years, that waterboarding…does violate our war crimes statute and is clearly illegal under domestic and international law. … I don’t think you have to have a lot of knowledge about the law to understand this technique violates Geneva Convention Common Article Three, the War Crimes statutes, and many other statutes that are in place.

Now, the Senator’s experience as a military lawyer for 25 years tells him that actions which are clearly illegal under domestic and international law are not criminal mistakes if they were taken out of fear. This is the novel IOKIYSB defense, that only someone with 25 years of legal experience could come up with: It’s OK if you’re shitting bricks.

The reason I don’t want to go back any more than we have already done is because I know what happened. Out of fear, we overreacted. … They took a view of the law that I think was aggressive, and I would not have approached it that way. Right after 9/11, we all thought we were going to be hit again. So as we go back and try to hold people criminally liable. I think we’re doing a lot of damage to the country, because their mistakes were not criminal mistakes. They were mistakes made out of fear.

In Senator Graham’s expert opinion, Bush and Cheney were shitting bricks for how many years exactly after 9/11?