Cite? My father is a WW II Vet, and he even employed ex-SSers after the war during the occupation. Were there atrocities by individual GIs? Of course there were. But if you are claiming that there was government sanctioned torture, I’ll need a cite. I’ve read extensively about the war and don’t recall seeing any such thing.
Now I know who Obama reminds me of: Doc Savage. He has a team of bickering experts, and is better at each even in their fields. He works for good. And he goes without a shirt all the time. 
My father was also a WWII vet and I have little doubt that he personally was not above using “enhanced” techniques when he was placed as the military mayor of a German town. At the minimum I wouldn’t have wanted to an SS man under his control. He was one tough SOB, and as a Jewish-American GI one of the first at the gates to liberate a concentration camp. But torture as a matter of policy? It seems not. Yes, Eisenhower pulled the trick of status change from POW to “Disarmed Enemy Combatant”, may have caused many to starve by limiting rations, and many were mistreated, but
I for one am deeply disappointed in Obama over issues like this and “don’t ask, don’t tell”. Torture is torture and when they die during torture, it is murder. And it seems many did die. And it seems that the torture was used for the purpose of eliciting confessions, without regard to truth, that there were WMD in Iraq. None of which is in the purview of the office of the President in a normally run Administration, but rather within that of the Attorney General at the DOJ, which is supposed to be run independently and in a non-partisan manner, that having been the point of complaining about the US Attorneys firings. All of these principles have been abandoned by Obama who has clearly said that he is for giving a pass on all of these crimes. I am really tired of the attitude that the law does not constrain the government. The least Obama could have done was to have said that these things are the decisions of the AG, and not the White House.
I suppose that this is better than Sarah Palin being a heartbeat away from the presidency, but at least if she were president and all these things were happening we’d have Tina Fey to make fun of her.
Overall it seems to me that an Obama presidency is no different than a Harry Reid presidency with a deeper voice.
Why? It was easier just to put them on the payroll, which has been documented. See Werner Von Braun
Which is part of the point regarding torturing for information, even if it is immaterial to the fact that it is wrong and illegal. Other methods work better than torture anyway.
But this does seem to be hijacking this thread.
The op is wrong in his basic premise. Obama is being given lots of grief by his leftward base and being cut no slack whatsoever by what’s left of the GOP. Those of us who supported him for the most part have no problem criticizing those decisions he makes that we disagree with. Bashing him like we did Bush will only occur if he accumulates a record deserving of that and there is no indication that such is remotely likely.
This is merely a restatement of the genetic fallacy. If you know that X is wrong, then it doesn’t matter (or it shouldn’t) who does it.
If Bush does something and you know that it is wrong, then Obama doing the same thing should also be wrong.
Unless you are basing your judgment on the notion that Bush is always wrong, and Obama is always right.
If they are doing the same thing, and you have found it was wrong, why are you assuming that it is OK now that Obama is doing it? The thing hasn’t changed; only the doer.
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks for the cite. My father, also Jewish, ran a small restaurant before the war, and got placed in charge of an officer’s club in southern Germany during the Occupation. So he did have SS officers working for him as waiters. I always got that he took enough pleasure in their having to work for a Jew that nothing more was required. But he never got near a camp, so he might have felt differently if he had.
Context does count. In the Bush situation, the abuse was ongoing and the pictures served to highlight the problem, in the face of initial denials. Now there are no denials, the torture has been stopped, and pictures already exist. If someone wanted to release pictures of torture from after Jan. 20, 2009, it would be a different story and I’d yell long and hard for them to be released.
If Obama is making what I see as the best choice from a selection of bad ones, I’ll support him, which is the case here.
I think the Obama team are letting the issue build up steam by itself without being them who drive it. I think they will let it continue to build up until doing something about it is inevitable. It might be a shrewd political approach. Most of the American people are not ready for indictments and many still defend the use of torture.
Um, no. There are degrees of wrong. Those who say the earth is flat and those who say it is a sphere are both wrong but one group is more wrong than the other and it is disingenuous to say they are both equally wrong.
Bush and his administration committed unspeakeble crimes. Saying Obama is the same because he does not denounce them strongly enough is just… well, incredibly silly.
Regards,
Shodan
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Is Shelley Winters still available to play the lead?
Obama has shown himself to be almost as pragmatic as he purports to be. If the situation deteriorates, or if there were a reason to, I can certainly see him leaving a few thousand troops in the country.
I dont see the change of mind as something inherently bad in Obama as it was in Bush. With Bush, we all know he was ideological and stuck to his guns despite evidence. Bush not changing his mind means that he’s simply too pig-headed to admit mistake. And when he does finally change his mind, it was because his stupid mistakes were becoming too big to ignore
However, Obama promised to look at programs that work and do not work. If he changes his mind, despite it being politically damaging, it perfectly fits with his criteria that new information requires new action. Maybe he shouldn’t have promised so much during the campaign, but his soaring rhetoric helped get him elected and I for one am not too disappointed that he’s had to back off from some of those lofty promises. I believe he’s looking at things in a new light, so if he says that he cannot do some of the things he promised, then I am convinced its because its the right thing to do, and not because he’s an ideologue
I don’t think we’ve changed our minds on the thing, but we do not yet consider the doer bad.
The previous doer did a few good things, but lots of bad things for years on end, and so we, especially those of us on “the other side” got to the point where we assumed everything was bad.
The current doer has done some bad and some good, and-really- very little overall. Combine that with the fact that he’s on “our side,” we still believe/hope that his track record of Good Things will be longer than Bad Things.