Obama releases the torture memos. Torture is bad, m’kay? And you members of the Bush team that authorized torture? You’re gonna get kicked in the nuts like this over and over again, over the next couple of years.
Here’s more on Obama’s statement re: the release, the Attorney General’s position on prosecuting the waterboarders, and the administration’s rationale as to maintaining a level of secrecy re: classified information in the future.
A news article with a shorter synopsis of the contents than the actual PDFs.
Yay!
May justice be swift.
Read the story. Damn no trials. Well at least the information is indisputably out there now. It’s a start.
I very much doubt that justice is possible. Retribution, perhaps, but not justice.
What about impeaching Jay Bybee as a federal judge for committing war crimes?
Merely a hired legal hack, a Republican version of the Soviet apparatchik. We can follow the slime trails, we already know where they lead. It isn’t just to pursue the functionaries while the puppet masters sit on their porch rocking chairs and dictate their memoirs.
Abhorrence and disdain will have to do, its all we’re likely to get. So it goes.
I really, really like that bit :
Yup, the problem isn’t that the US image is, and will remain tarnished for a long time because of everything Gitmo stood for - the problem is YOU TATTLED ON US ! Bad Obama ! Learn from bastions of international cooperation and trustworthiness such as Soviet Russia : no one ever knew what the hell happened in the basement of the Lubianka, and people loved them for it ! :smack:
Yeah, and it’s really going to stop the next lot to realize that there will be no real consequences. If the people who are asked to actually perform the torture realize that the eventual result will be a decade or two in prison, perhaps the next puppet-master will get a, “Fuck no! Are you crazy?” from his henchmen.
I am sadly and sorely disappointed in the new administration on this issue. I’d hoped for better. I’d hoped that Obama’s administration would at least try the alleged criminals.
sigh Same shit; different day.
Doesn’t the UN have the ability to prosecute for war crimes? Is that a possibility?
With all due, Frank, how? What prosecutor in his/her right mind would take this case, knowing they’ll be up against battalions of highly-paid lawyers. The evidentiary stuff alone will take years if they decide to gum up the works, and you can bet your ass they will, this is a billable hours bonanza, an avalanche of Benjamins!
And the jury? To have any hope, you’d have to have a jury that believes as we do, that the law cannot be modified to admit the unspeakable simply by a highly sourced memo. All of them like minded with us.
And then witnesses, dragged kicking and screaming, leaving long fingernail ruts in the linoleum. Maybe a nice long diversion through Federal court about the legality of subpoenas. Then another on the application of the Fifth Amendment. Can you plead the Fifth while simultaneously claiming that your actions or inactions were not illegal? Or can you use them as successive defenses falling back into the second decade of deliberations?
A nightmare.
Well, it’s very early days yet. I don’t think it would be wise for Obama to start talking about how we’re gonna hunt down the torturers and put them in jail. Not now, anyway. He can’t be perceived as being politically motivated. When we start prosecuting these guys in future years, it’s got to be because the evidence demanded it. And the public has to be prepared for it.
Obviously certain types of people are going to support torture. But most Americans when confronted with the reality of torture will come around. They might think a terrorist deserves a bit of torture, but they aren’t going to like the idea that the CIA has the power to torture. It’s not so much what torture does to the victims as what it does to the perpetrators. People might imagine they want terrorists tortured, but they haven’t thought it through. Once they do, they’ll support prosecution of the torturers, those who gave the orders, and those who facilitated.
You’ve got good points. So what?
I’ve never seen justice defined as ‘an easy conviction’. Attempting to convict the criminals in the Bush administration would be better by far than just throwing up our hands and saying, “Whaddya gonna do?” It would demonstrate a strength of purpose and a moral base in our national soul.
Instead, I’m left with the niggling suspicion that what I’m really hearing in the news is, “Y’know, we might want to do that ourselves someday.”
And one more thing. Even if this never leads to the prosecution of more than a few of the perps, exposure is a pretty good second place. Especially exposure of the fact that the torture accomplished NOTHING. It’s one thing when the torturers could pretend to be Jack Bauer, kicking terrorist ass to keep Americans safe. It’s another when it’s revealed that they were lawyers writing memos, guys who needed a memo telling them it was OK before they’d do anything, guys who were just sadists, guys who tortured the wrong people, guys who provided no actual valuable intelligence, guys who ruined relations with friendly nations, guys who made things ten times harder for the people who were really trying to accomplish something in Iraq.
A Jack Bauer who makes his own rules and who tortures a scumbag to save New York can be forgiven. But that’s not who these guys were. They were bureaucrats who tortured helpless prisoners for nothing. And the truth will come out.
Guys who were following orders?
Unfortunately, that will only work for a few years until this decade is looked upon as quaint by the next bunch of henchmen. I think going after the CIA agents that did the torturing as a matter of deterrence will cause more problems than it would prevent (unless they were the ones who requested the authority in the first place).
I do hope for prosecutions of those who gave orders, those who provided legal cover and some kind of lawyering job to the law so this doesn’t happen again. I have no idea how to do any of those things, though.
I just think Obama’s announcements that they aren’t interested in prosecuting these guys have a whiff of hostage negotiator to them. He doesn’t want to be seen as leading the charge. And so he’ll hold back publicly, and release all this crap, and pretty soon the American people are going to be demanding that these guys get prosecuted. And so, more in sorrow than in anger, he’ll give in and let justice take it’s course.
Or so I believe. Could be wrong. But a president who really really wanted to let these guys off the hook would’ve fought hard not to release these memos.
Well, I hope you’re right, and I’m wrong.
You know, if they had even one example of torture providing information that actually saves lives by preventing an attack…we wouldn’t stand a chance. They could just stand there and shake their heads (more in sorrow than in anger) at our naive insistance on morality, pat us on the head and suggest we leave all this to the grown-ups. Like they used to do when we asked uncomfortable questions about Cental American nuns, and stuff like that.
But they don’t, apparently, or they’d use it. So, in all the instances of torture, it never had a tangible benefit. So worse than vile, corrupt, and an abomination, its also impractical. It doesn’t work.
I don’t much like engaging with minds who find that compelling when mere humanity won’t carry the day. But if we must, we must: it doesn’t work.
You get that, guys? Not only should we got to Hell for doing it, it doesn’t work.