Opinion: In today’s pages: War crimes, Supreme Court nominees and taxes
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On the Op-Ed page today, the editorial board’s Marjorie Miller does a Q&A with British barrister Philippe Sands about the legal underpinnings for a Spanish court’s investigation into the alleged torture of Spanish citizens who were detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Here’s a sample:
Is there legal precedent in going after the lawyers? There is legal precedent. The precedent includes U.S. military tribunals in Germany in the 1940s. More recently, you’ve got actions in Britain, Spain and the United States where lawyers, for example, designed money-laundering schemes intended to subvert rules that criminalize money laundering. There are plenty of cases to show that, where lawyers act in a way to subvert the rules, they can themselves become complicit in crime.
You might not agree with Sands’ reasoning, but it’s a compelling read. Elsewhere on the Op-Ed page, former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin argues that the estate tax should be eliminated because it discourages small business from making rational investment decisions. And columnist Tim Rutten urges President Obama to look beyond the federal bench for the next Supreme Court justice.
On the editorial page, the Times board urges the Los Angeles Unified School District to resist pressure to spend all of the federal stimulus money -- two years’ worth of aid -- in the current school year:
If you were given an allowance to feed yourself for the week, would you parcel it out to last seven days or spend everything the first two days and assume that, when you’re broke and hungry, people will give you more money? Strange to say, the second choice is favored by many these days at Los Angeles’ schools.
The board also offers Obama some advice for his coming meetings with Afghan and Pakistani leaders. And it says much of the president’s new proposal to raise taxes on overseas earnings is populism disguised as tax reform.