Does Obama now plan to excuse all past crimes so we can "move on"?
So, let me try to get this straight . . .
Obama pronounces that "we do not torture" but when he uncovers proof that some of us (well, not you or I, but some Bushites) HAVE TORTURED, Obama says, "not important ... nothing to see here ... move along ... we aren't going to punish anyone" !
Is Obama friggin' for real?
Is Obama just a certifiable nutcase?
OF COURSE we punish war crimes ... and these were war crimes.
Lyndie England (remember her and the Abu Ghraib photographs that stunned this nation?) is rotting in prison for doing LESS horrible things to prisoners than the CIA guys (and women?) did to prisoners at the urging of the Bush administration top echelon.
It should have been a wake-up call to anyone and everyone dealing with prisoner interrogations that the FBI had REFUSED to participate in the interrogations the CIA was conducting in Guantanamo. The FBI said two things: (1) the FBI does NOT engage in torture because it is ILLEGAL, and (2) the FBI does not engage in torture because it is NOT PRODUCTIVE; prisoners will say anything to stop the pain and often offer up imaginary information that WASTES the valuable time of law enforcement people who are then required to chase all over the world on wild goose chases based on NON-EXISTENT clues.
TORTURE DOES NOT WORK. There are more effective ways of getting useful and accurate information.
The CIA people torture because at least a few of them get their jollies that way.
A THIRD reason we, as a nation, should not engage in torture is that we LOSE the moral high ground when we do so, AND we put every American in harm's way of being tortured by people who capture them (for whatever reason) ... we would not have a legal or moral leg to stand on if Americans were caught, kidnapped, or taken hostage and then tortured.
Bush and his legal team just wanted to show the Arab world how "macho" Bush and his advisors are/were.
None of this torture had anything to do with getting accurate information -- it was just people exercising their sadistic impulses under the cover of DOJ memos that permitted/encouraged them to do so.
Any CIA interrogator who has not been familiarized with the Geneva Conventions and various American laws prohibiting torture has NO business being in any room with a prisoner.
At the beginning, approx. 600 prisoners Cheney claimed were "high-value" were imprisoned in Guantanamo. We can probably assume most if not all of those 600 were horribly abused and/or tortured. Since the first days of Guantanamo, at least 500 have been RELEASED because they were NOT guilty of anything connected with the United States. They had been captured, rounded up or handed over to the American military by the leaders of rival tribal groups in exchange for the RANSOMS we were offering. The 500 "not guilty" prisoners had been hideously abused and/or tortured despite the fact they should never have been incarcerated by the American military in the first place.
If that makes anyone feel good, I can only mourn for them.
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that was part of the reason Bush was so happy to be friendly and cordial to Obama. Obama never intended to hold Bush responsible for anything.
Congressman Jerrold Nadler is calling for a special prosecutor.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/41806
I think Obama did as much as he possibly could in this instance without inciting a civil war within his administration from the CIA, DIA, DOD, National Security Agency, etc. He gave the American public all the information they need to make their own judgment about what happened over the last 8 years. He hid nothing except certain career officers' names. He didn't have to provide ANY of this information, and he provided ALL of it--save the names. And prosecutions of the original authors of these memos, and other high-level officials, are still quite possible.
The president has to have a functioning intelligence bureaucracy. If he began prosecuting career officers who were originally told their actions were legally protected, the intelligence bureaucracy would turn on him like a dime--in the midst of two wars, no less.
Also, one can only imagine how all-consuming such prosecutions would become of Obama's presidency . That kind of 200% distraction might be a plus for my PUMA friends at Partizane, but it certainly isn't in the best interests of the administration and, more importantly, the country.
Barack Obama needs to read up on the Nuremberg trials and see what America has asserted in the past about "responsibility."
At the Nuremberg trials after World War II, the Allied nations adopted the Nuremberg Principles, which were a set of guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime. We, in America, have conducted ourselves according to those Principles ever since.
Principle IV states: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."
"Following orders" was NOT an excuse for committing war crimes during WWII -- and it isn't now.
The United States either is or isn't a nation of laws.
If we put an entire segment of our population OUTSIDE the reach of law, how are we better than any police state?
In America, NO man is above the law -- it's what, at our founding, differentiated America from all other nations.
If we put an entire segment of our population OUTSIDE the reach of law, how are we better than any police state?
In more ways than we can count. Just to rattle off a handful of the differences:
We have unfettered free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly (as last week showed), freedom of worship, freedom from worship, right to property, right to privacy. We have equal opportunity of employment, and are moving towards full equal opportunity in the law (gay marriage,anyone?) We live in a country that now does not torture, and that has restored habeas corpus. We have trial by jury. We have an exhaustive appeals process. We have the presumption of innocence. We live in a country that does not have a Stasi-like citizen-spy network reporting on each other. We do not have summary executions. We do not disappear citizens. We do not behead citizens. We have reproductive rights for women. We have freedom of choice regarding marriage. We do not have female slavery. We do not have slavery. We do not have wholesale genocide of unpopular ethnic minorities. We do not imprison the political opposition (with some exceptions: see Don Siegelman). We have free and fair elections. We have legitimate elections, unlike the 90% success rates enjoyed by the heads of "police states". We have highly competitive elections on the district, local, county, state, and national levels. We live in a democracy. We do not live in a "police state.
There are also more flaws with America than we can count. Churchill probably said it best: "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." Those flaws don't add up to a "police state", however. I'm sure any of the residents of the former East Germany would agree.
I'd like to move there. It sounds like a much nicer country than the one I live in.
It sounds much shittier than the one I live in.
I'm offering an open invitation back to America. Come on over!
Layla, I guess you didn't read carefully and, so, you wrote down a list of the rights and privileges we NOW have -- which is IMMATERIAL to what I wrote.
I wrote: "IF we put an entire segment of our population outside the reach of law..."
Did you not see the word "IF"?
I did NOT say we ARE a police state; I wrote, "If we put an entire segment of our population OUTSIDE the reach of law" ... meaning that IF we do that, we could (and probably would) lose the very rights and privileges we now have.
How can you not "get" that?
Do you think police states happen because people want them?
No, police states happen when the government's "enforcers" are IMMUNIZED from prosecution for wrongdoing -- and anything they do in the name of "safeguarding" the populace is okay and not punishable by our laws because they have been put OUTSIDE the REACH of the LAW.
We do not put an entire segment of our population OUTSIDE the REACH of the LAW, in America, because our founders took the bold stance that NO ONE is above the law -- not even the government's enforcers (read: the CIA, the FBI, or the local police).
I am grateful we have all the rights and privileges you so carefully enumerated, but unless we continue as a nation to subscribe to the very belief our founders designed our Constitution to protect -- that no man is above the law -- we would NOT have them very long.
Layla, you might read up on our founding era as well as on the Nuremberg Principles.
James Madison (the Father of our Constitution) wrote: "...it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise..."
I guess you didn't read carefully
Did you not see the word "IF
How can you not "get" that?
you might read up on our founding era as well as on the Nuremberg Principles
You don't need to be so snide to make your point. I get it now, although I didn't the first time around, and I'm not crazy for interpreting your original comment the way I did. Comparison is easily conflated with conclusion, by both the writer and the reader.
You guys just love to pile on me, and it gets tiresome and upsetting at times.
Layla, what do you expect? You know the main focus of this blog. It is a blog which recognizes the inadequacies of our new president, even if you do not.
You want agreement? Go post on dKos.
I have no problem with disagreement. But you and many others here use "disagreement" as a cudgel to drive dissenters like me away, not just to have a substantive debate. I say something you disagree with, you call me a liar. Or someone else calls me an idiot. Or both. You can't just disagree, dissent is so upsetting to you you have to push it away by being rude and hostile.
It is behavior that you've often described encountering on other blogs. I'm surprised to see it used here as well. Maybe I shouldn't be.
the BotoSphere could not understand why some of us could not jump on the bandwagon. I even got calls from way up the Clinton food chain trying to bring me on board before Denver.
I was not ready then and in my newly Independent registration state, I'm not ready now. I give him and his props when they are deserved, like the Hi-Speed rail inniative, but I like many others am not reeady to just "debate" the issues that divided us with his followers. Some of us are ready but we each have our own internal calendars and the BotoSphere needs to accept the fact that many of us are lost to the Democratic Party forever.
Why then is Partizane forcefully open to all?
Because i would love to discuss Hi-Speed rail with you. I would love your input on ways women can help the environmental fight. I also want the input of those on the right and far left or middle. Partizane launched with the purpose of recapturing the middle. We've moved towards the focus on women but it is always with the goal of forming a new middle, a blender of the good, bad and not yet tried from all sides.
Civil Discourse - ERA - A Mother President - Women's Rights - Primary Reform
the Nuremberg Principles, it's literally the entire foundation of international law that Obama is thumbing the administration's nose at! To not investigate and potentially prosecute war crimes is as low as you get and puts us right there with Serbia in that regard.
This is an active obstruction of justice and should be a felony or a high crime.
In the words of Justice Brandeis: "In a government of law, the existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."
was under court order to provide the documents. Now he could've fought their release in court but nevertheless he had to obey the court or explain why he was fighting it.
that most Republicans/Conservatives are either silent or slightly pleased with this. They are venting their spleens on doing the tea party thing while Jon Stewert works hard to make tea bags a symbol of testicles or visa versa.
It seems only a short time ago that the Dems were protesting and the Reps were calling them unAmerican. Once again, politics has shown us that it isn't the act or the deed or the doer - it's whose ox is being gored. People are so easily led to ignore facts. Very easy to do when the media seldom addresses them - it seems to prefer Grimms' fairy tales - the grimmer the better.
I stopped watching KO quite sometime ago. But it was nice to see someone somewhere calling this BS for what it is.
The effect of Obama's statement upon the memos' release is 'Well, here's the memos you wanted but I won't let the public or the government do anything based on this information.'
Bonus: Here's a short video of Colbert's take on Bagram.
Independently adrift
did essentially the same thing in pardoning Nixon. It didn't work out too well for Ford. We moved on but we left Jerry behind.
of Nixon was pathetic, but this is much worse. The consequences could be much more far ranging.