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redneckgaijinDavid Cole recently described, quite well, the damage Obama's torture policy has wrought.
Read the whole thing, but this especially speaks to me:
Someone needs to be held accountable for not being able to hold terrorists accountable- that is, not without totally disregarding the highest laws of our land.
Obama won't prosecute torture. He protects torturers. That, by itself, makes him at least a scofflaw... if not a war criminal himself.
Read the whole thing, but this especially speaks to me:
The Ghailani verdict is a kind of accountability. We are paying for the torture we chose to inflict. But it’s deeply unsatisfactory. The torturers—President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, and Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to name just a few—are not held responsible. They remain free to travel the lecture circuit and publish books bragging about their crimes. It is the families of victims of the embassy bombings who must pay the price—in foregone justice—for the crimes the Bush administration perpetrated in its “war on terror.”
Someone needs to be held accountable for not being able to hold terrorists accountable- that is, not without totally disregarding the highest laws of our land.
Obama won't prosecute torture. He protects torturers. That, by itself, makes him at least a scofflaw... if not a war criminal himself.
read.
Date: 2010-11-28 07:59 pm (UTC)In my country there also were those who wanted mostly to move on . ( half my childhood and adolescence I have heard that one "can't we forget this now?" - at least some perpetrators paid for their crimes though even some who were not sentenced in Nuremberg which arguably was a court convened by the victors of war, but some people got caught and sentenced by their own countrymen. I am proud that we did that , I am not proud that we did not try harder and caught them all. I am not proud that the very people who thought up the legal niceties around Nuremberg Laws (declaring Jews as Non-Germans and not protected by law) continued to have careers after the war and only got bad press in time for their retirement parties. ( they did not kill or torture personally, they only wrote the legal commentary allowing other to do it )
I am not proud that at least one man, who as military judge ordered death to numerous deserters up to the last days of the war, later had a career leading up to being prime-minister (governor ) of a state ( not mine ).
I am not proud that in general efficient administrators who had supported the Nazis by being efficient administrators continued to have careers as efficient administrators. I am not proud that so damn few of my countrymen ever showed remorse and regret over what they did in the war.
And eventually - 20 years on - Americans may/will feel the same way. Except that it looks as if neither a US nor any other ( international) court will try the torturers. So they will have less to be proud of.