Ted Sorensen Stands Against Torture Pardons, Making Him a BuzzFlash Wings Of Justice Winner

WINGS OF JUSTICE

Ted Sorensen

'Tis the season of commencement speakers, and the University of Nebraska College of Law surely snagged one of the best -- as it happens, one of their own -- Ted Sorensen. Best known as a speechwriter and top adviser to President John F. Kennedy, Sorensen also advised and supported candidate Barack Obama in recent months. Sorensen coauthored Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Profiles in Courage, assisted on JFK's "Ask not ..." inaugural speech and helped draft letters to Nikita Khrushchev during the Bay of Pigs.

But Sorensen is not yet content to rest on his laurels. The day after his 81st birthday, he tackled the torture issue, laying it out at the feet of the graduating University of Nebraska law class. We borrow from The Lincoln Journal Star's report, itself based on Sorensen's prepared remarks:

Sorensen ... said illegal tactics promoted to defend the country actually weakened U.S. national security.

“Yes, torture gets results,” he said.

“It has resulted in easier, swifter, more successful recruitment for terrorist organizations ...

“It also resulted in a sharp decline in America’s standing among allies who might otherwise have provided intelligence and other forms of help.

“It has cost us the respect of other countries that we enjoyed, which protected us against attacks from abroad.”

“Intellectually and morally dishonest lawyers (in the Department of Justice) disgraced not only their country but their profession” in claiming that waterboarding and other forms of torture were legal, he said.

“In a country based on the rule of law, in which no man is above the law, whatever his rank or title, no man can undertake, authorize or immunize unlawful conduct,” Sorensen said.

“Our current wonderful president cannot promise the CIA practitioners of torture that they will not be prosecuted,” he said.

... “it is clear that the guilty include political ideologues, cowardly bureaucrats and inexperienced psychologists, all of whom plead ignorance of the law.

“But what about the lawyers?” he asked.

America’s best military leaders do not support torture because they know it will lead to its use against U.S. military personnel, Sorensen said.

“They know that the moral authority of the United States, its traditional ability to occupy the moral high ground in an international conflict, is an important part of our security,” he said.

“More important than the worthless statements extracted from torture’s victims who will cry out anything to halt it.”

Ted Sorensen has courageously chastised those currently in power, including the President, and lectured to some who may assume power so they will know that torture is not only wrong and worthless, but unpardonable. For that, and his deep wells of wisdom, Ted Sorensen garners still one more laurel -- this week's BuzzFlash Wings of Justice award.

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Nominated by BuzzFlash staff. To see a full list of past Wings of Justice honorees, click here.

WINGS OF JUSTICE