Eric : “I agree with you that these decisions [whether the U.S. should breach its treaty obligations] should be made by politically responsible officials at the highest levels .”
Of course I agree with Eric that if
Congress
authorized the CIA to engage in cruel treatment, such a later-enacted statute would, for domestic-law purposes, supersede the executive obligation not to breach the treaties. But it’s not an accident that even in the wake of
Hamdan
, and with the enactment of the MCA,
no one
in Washington—not even Dick Cheney and David Addington or any member of Congress—has proposed a law that would permit cruel treatment and torture or that would otherwise place the U.S. in breach of the CAT and the Geneva Conventions. And that’s because
everyone
in Washington agrees—at least publicly—that a public and conspicuous national decision to breach those treaties would have disastrous international consequences (not to mention that it would undermine the moral authority that we worked decades to build). To the extent that Eric or Ben is proposing such a statute (and I don’t quite read Ben to be advocating that, except perhaps in his hypothesized emergency “exception”), it’s simply a political nonstarter (for which I am thankful).
And so the question remains: If Congress does not authorize breaches of the treaties—and it won’t—is the
president
one of the “politically responsible officials at the higest levels” who can
unilaterally
decide to breach? If so, on what theory?
