http://thinkprogress.org/2009/…
Bush: I Personally Authorized Torture Of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed»
In an interview with Brit Hume that aired today on Fox News Sunday, President Bush admitted that he personally authorized the torture of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He said he personally asked “what tools” were available to use on him, and sought legal approval for waterboarding him:BUSH: One such person who gave us information was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. … And I’m in the Oval Office and I am told that we have captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools, and I said are these tools deemed to be legal? And so we got legal opinions before any decision was made.
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/…
The President admits torture, a war crime, on national TV.
In a rational country, he would be charged. But America is no longer a rational country. It is a country where rational people are held hostage by the political culture created by the Republicans and their torturing President. It is a country where politics is more important than the Rule of Law.
ONLY politics is preventing justice from being done.
And lest you buy his bullshit…
….the torture of Abu Zubayda and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed provided next to zero useful intelligence, as a recent Vanity Fair article revealed:
But according to a former senior C.I.A. official, who read all the interrogation reports on K.S.M., “90 percent of it was total f*cking bullsh*t.” A former Pentagon analyst adds: “K.S.M. produced no actionable intelligence. He was trying to tell us how stupid we were.”
In fact, the article explained that the “intelligence” gleaned from Zubayda was false information about non-existent links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein – information the Bush administration seized on as a major part of its argument for the Iraq war, as a former Pentagon analyst explained:
“The intelligence community was lapping this up, and so was the administration, obviously. Abu Zubaydah was saying Iraq and al-Qaeda had an operational relationship. It was everything the administration hoped it would be.” […]
“The White House knew he’d been tortured. I didn’t, though I was supposed to be evaluating that intelligence. … It seems to me they were using torture to achieve a political objective.”
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/…
OBAMA:We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. … My orientation is going to be moving foward.
Obama explained that he doesn’t want CIA employees to “suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.” He did not specifically rule out a special prosecutor, saying, “That doesn’t mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law.”
http://www.coastalpost.com/09/…
Olbermann asked [John] Dean why Democratic leaders like Sen. Carl Levin have been proposing a special commission to investigate allegations of torture, “rather than the incoming attorney general, Mr. Holder, just sending somebody out to arrest these guys before they leave the capital.”“There is a degree of conventional wisdom that suspects that Mr. Obama really doesn’t want to take this issue on,” Dean replied. “It’s not a unifying move.”
Olbermann noted that the problem with bipartisan special commissions, like the one created after 9/11, is that they are “almost openly dedicated to not pointing fingers.”
“Don’t we have to point fingers?” he asked Dean. “Is that not the way justice works?”
Dean agreed, saying that if those involved in war crimes are not singled out, “this is going to really reflect terribly on the entire country, not just on the Bush administration which has engaged in these activities, but it really will reflect on the Obama administration for its refusal to pursue them and prosecute them.”
“I think there’s serious consequences if they refuse to point fingers,” Dean stated.
Olbermann asked what Dean saw as the best and most realistic outcome, and Dean replied that it “would be if Mr. Obama, indeed, does exactly what he said during the campaign — that he will, indeed, when his attorney general is seated, have him instructed to immediately look and see if these offenses have been committed, if they are prosecutable … and then report to him and the nation to make it very clear that this is not the policy of the Obama administration or the United States.”
Someone once said that the worst part of totalitarians is that fighting them brings you down to their level.
Unless something is done, and apparently it won’t be unless we drag our government kicking and screaming to it …..Here we are.
ONLY politics is preventing justice from being done. Is that who America is? Is that who you are? If we accept this, if we let this pass, we are all brought down to the level of George Bush and Dick Cheney. They will have won, and humanity will have lost. Can you live with that? With Bush and Cheney decidering who you are and what you as an American stand for?
30 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
.
Jay Elias addresses this same point here from a slightly different perspective.
Would you believe that I was just at the same moment trying to put that very same article and video of Bush up on Patriot Daily’s essay (had trouble with the video), so lost the post — have a copy of it, anyway. I couldn’t believe it when I went back in and here it was, I thought mine had somehow “taken.” LOL!
I agree with it all — yours and Jay’s essays — and our purpose and what should be the purpose of Americans period. We cannot let up on this issue.
There is a tremendous tendency “at the top” and with much of media to try and diminish the importance of torture and to make light of it. Cheney tried to use specific circumstances justifying its use — an effort to sway the minds of Americans — oh, torture is O.K. in “certain circumstances.”
The other aspect of it is that people really don’t want to look at it period — it’s heinous, it’s ugly, it’s filthy, it makes you feel creepy, we couldn’t have done that, I can’t bear to look at that picture – and on and on and on! People, generally, don’t want to look at torture in the face. We HAVE to make them!
And it’s the same ole, same ole — the United States is special, it’s entitled, it’s superior! So, we can do it. But we attack and condemn Russia for going into Georgia, countries with “nuclar” weapons, while we do the very things that we will NOT permit any other country to do!
You get so sick of the hypocrisy everywhere you look, doncha’?
We will not reclaim Ameirca until we repudiate torture and bring the torturers to justice.
and sickening. If Obama doesn’t force the United States to look into its’ soul and PROSECUTE WAR CRIMES… I don’t know. I just don’t know.
No one has ever claimed that torture is the only, or most effective tool to gain information. The claim is always that it is faster, that with threats in real time, we cannot afford to play nicely with ticking time bombs out there.
But even so, even though we “need” to torture to get this information quickly, we have plenty of time to get legal opinions. Sure, it needs to be done to protect American lives, but not if there is any chance I might get in trouble for it. I’m the President of the United States, and I wouldn’t risk prison to save all of your lives.
taking a the moral stand on this. Not One of any prominence saying “we broke the law, we tortured, and we’re guilty of war crimes”.
Why aren’t the Democratic leaders shouting from the roof tops.
I know politicians have no shame but this is crazy.
NO SHAME AT ALL.
I’m ashamed of my country. I used to think we were better than this…
It’s a very sad time.
written on the use of torture — ALL say that it is ineffective as a means of gathering any significant informtion. At best, you might say that torture sates the sadistic ego of those who perpetrate it.
that politics trumps justice. I think that’s the way it has always been. This is just the most egregious case of that.
Politicians play politics – that’s what they’re elected to do. Obama has to spend most/all of his political capital on fixing the economy. Otherwise he doesn’t get the chance to do anything else. Its the game he signed up to play.
But its not our game. And the only way to change the game they’re playing is to get enough people to listen/agree with us that the rules, as they exist right now, are changed.
Also, I heard two things in what Obama said on Sunday:
1. He’s giving Holder a big part of this call. So I think our petition is aimed perfectly.
2. The convincing argument will be focused on how “moving forward” is hampered or made impossible if we don’t deal with the war crimes of the past.
new signatures a day on the petition, but suddenly in the past 20 hours or so we’ve had nearly five hundred again… something is getting it more widespread coverage.