Torturing for America

[babsbunny]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,622382,00.html

By Thomas Darnstädt

Barack Obama has released memos detailing torture methods approved by the Bush administration but has stopped short of punishing the perpetrators. His decision puts the US to the kind of test it has not seen since Vietnam or Watergate.

What should a president do about the crimes of his predecessor? Barack Obama had been "thinking about this for four weeks, really," says his advisor David Axelrod.

The issue seems straightforward enough. What the CIA did to prisoners on behalf of the administration of former US President George W. Bush and its appalling legal advisers during the so-called "war on terror" was torture. And torture is a serious crime, not just in the United States, but almost everywhere else in the world. The next steps seem obvious enough: indict the guilty and send them to prison, end of story. Why, as one European legal expert put it, would anyone need to think about it for four weeks?

[Senator]

1. "Unlike Obama today, {Nuremberg Judge Robert} Jackson really was looking forward."

That's really the bottom line. Obama's "looking forward" is looking away from inconvenient truths/duties to look only at short-term interests/crises.

Failing to clearly demonstrate that we have a zero-tolerance policy on torture and torturers simply does more damage. It's worse than the torture itself.

==

[rhett o rick]

2. There is the thought that prosecuting torture will tear the country apart.

I saw the country is already badly damaged. And to heal properly we need to get this over with. By that I mean, investigate and prosecute. If our country can't recover from that, we didn't really have a country.

I believe when push comes to shove, the American people will choose not to be a torture country.

[Senator]

3. Such "sky is falling!" talk hardly qualifies as thought.

It's just another form of "mushroom clouds!"

Since it worked on the perpetration side, why not use the same terrorizing on the getaway side.

--

[rhett o rick]

5. Agree. nm

[mmonk]

6. That would presuppose we have input.

[mmonk]

4. No reason except to not deal with it fully and honestly.

[noise]

7. First the country

needs to stop pretending that torture was a good faith counterterrorism program. I understand the position that torture is illegal and thus it matters not whether it is an effective interrogation method. IMO it is exceptionally important to go further than this and question the motives of those who sanctioned the torture. The public record indicates that the torture was implemented for ulterior reasons.

FBI agent Soufan recently stated in a NYT Op-Ed that legal interrogation methods were working. It sure appears that the only reason the CIA was called in was because the White House wanted to use interrogation derived information for political gain. Thus, we had the CIA program with false confessions and no outside scrutiny.

Why did we trash the rule of law because a few corrupt officials told us they needed the crutch of police state powers to prevent terrorist attacks? Why hasn't the patriotism of the pro-torture crowd been questioned?

What is patriotic about the Bush/Cheney torture program?

[OneBlueSky]

8. I'm not sure how to delicately phrase this, but I'll give it a go . . .

Barack Obama knows full well the power of the wealthy multi-national interests in Washington, New York, and elsewhere . . . he also knows that the fundamentalist (and mostly Christian) conservatives who surrounded and enabled George W. Bush are still around, many still in the government . . . further, he likely knows that if he steps too far from the tacitly agreed upon "middle of the road," then all bets are off and very powerful forces could be set in motion that do not have his, or our, best interests at heart . . .

even if Obama wants to prosecute, on this one he may be wise to leave initiating the process to others . . . I'm sure he recalls that some of the best and the brightest who tried to take on the establishment directly left us far too early -- we all know their names . . .

so maybe, in this case, discretion is the better part of valor . . . or something like that . . . :shrug:

[EFerrari]

9. Precisely. We have a violent history that we have to stop denying.

Obama is standing knee deep in a snakepit and we all know it.

Imho, he's taken good steps and he's being careful and I'm glad because we need him to do both.