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July 6, 2005
What he don't know won't hurt him
Christian Crumlish
According to Editor and Publisher:
Posted by xian at July 6, 2005 3:03 PM | TrackBackLawrence O'Donnell, the MSNBC analyst who first broke the Rove/Cooper link on Friday, wrote on the Huffington Post blog today, that Rove's lawyer had "launched what sounds like an I - did - not - inhale defense. He told Newsweek that his client 'never knowingly disclosed classified information.' Knowingly.
"Not coincidentally, the word 'knowing' is the most important word in the controlling statute ( U.S. Code: Title 50: Section 421). To violate the law, Rove had to tell Cooper about a covert agent 'knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States.'"
It’s interesting that probable Supreme-to-Be Gonzales broke new ground in a related obfuscation. In his memo to the White House on torture. he says that even if you “knowingly” inflict a torturous level of pain on a suspect, that doesn’t make it torture.
What is required is that you inflicted the pain purely for the purpose of inflicting the pain. If you knowingly inflict such pain on a suspect for the purpose of, say, extracting information, it is not torture, because the infliction of pain is only incidental to your purpose.
When I first saw this, I couldn’t help thinking--because of the odd way he worded it--that he had in the back of his mind an insane (and tortuous) misreading of G. E. M. Anscombe’s wonderful little book Intention.
