Res ipsa loquitor is a frequent legal-Latin expression meaning "the thing speaks for itself," such as that smoking gun you're holding over a newly dead body.
If your pilot takes the wrong runway and crashes and burns upon take-off, well, we don't need to spend a lot of time establishing fault, from the dead passengers' viewpoint, as the thing speaks for itself: someone was negligent. The only question is how to parcel out the shares of blame: pilot, airline, airport, runway designer, lighting and electrical people, tower, FAA, etc. But fault is a given; that speaks for itself. It means fault is presupposed, assumed, presumed, or just plain unarguable, at least not convincingly.
Some folks have been wondering whether the CIA has been engaged in illegal activity, what with kidnapping bad guys and spiriting them around the world to secret places where bad things happen to them so you and I can sleep safer at night, assuming the bad-guys' friends take it lying down.
Now that the Bush Administration keeps on losing court battles over the legality of how it has been waging the Global War on Terror, illegally, it seems, according to case such as Hamdi, Hamdan, and ACLU v. NSA, the CIA employees are starting to get nervous.
They've begun taking out insurance to pay the lawyers who are going to argue that they were just following orders, just as at Nuremberg in 1945, when sued, prosecuted, or hauled before grand juries and Congress. That seems to be the spectrum of legal rat-holes down which government employees can be expected to be spending on lawyers the money they were going to retire or buy the sailboat on.
The story is below.
Res ipsa loquitor.
Selling Nuremburg insurance sounds like it may be a boom market.