Sunday Morning Not Funnies: Rahm Speaks

( – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Or misspeaks, perhaps.

Or ABC News “This Week” online headline reads:

“Obama Administration: No Prosecution of Officials for Bush-Era Torture Policy”

Rahm Emanuel on This Week

says: No Prosecution of Officials for Bush-Era Torture Policy.

another link, more general to the ABC show

GS: I asked [Rahm] Emanuel: “The president has ruled out prosecution for CIA officials who believed they were following the law. Does he believe that the officials who devised the policies should be immune from prosecution?”

Recommend this diary and this one too.

News when I can get over my outrage.- ek hornbeck

[Rahm] Emanuel: “He believes that, look, as you saw in that statement he wrote, let’s just take a step back. He came up with this and worked on this for about four weeks. Wrote that statement Wednesday night after he had made his decision and dictated what he wanted to see. And Thursday morning I saw him in the office, he was still editing it. He believes that people in good faith were operating with the guidance they were provided,” Emanuel said.

What about those who devised the policy, I asked?

“Yeah, but those who devised the policy, he believes that they were, should not be prosecuted either,” Emanuel said.

“And it’s not the place that we go, and as he said in that letter, and I would really recommend people  look at the full statement, not the letter, the statement, and that second paragraph: “This is not a time for retribution. It’s a time for reflection. It’s not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back and in a sense of anger and retribution.’ We have a lot to do to protect America. But what people need to know? This practice and technique, we don’t use anymore. We banned it.”

Not sure (I still have to re-listen to the video clip!) but here’s this from the NYT I think George referred to:

NYT, US Politics

“The thing we still don’t know about him is what he is willing to fight for,” said Leonard Burman, an economist at the Urban Institute and a Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration. “The thing I worry about is that he likes giving good speeches, he likes the adulation and he likes to make people happy.”

So far, he said, “It’s hard to think of a place where he’s taken a really hard position.”

In some of his earliest skirmishes, Mr. Obama eventually chose pragmatism over fisticuffs.

and we also have this, from today’s NYT Op Ed:

The Torturers’ Manifesto

The Americans Civil Liberties Union deserves credit for suing for the memos’ release. And President Obama deserves credit for overruling his own C.I.A. director and ordering that the memos be made public. It is hard to think of another case in which documents stamped “Top Secret” were released with hardly any deletions.

But this cannot be the end of the scrutiny for these and other decisions by the Bush administration.

Until Americans and their leaders fully understand the rules the Bush administration concocted to justify such abuses – and who set the rules and who approved them – there is no hope of fixing a profoundly broken system of justice and ensuring that that these acts are never repeated.

Man, I hate politics.