(10 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Eric Holder, Assistant to Attorney General Lindsey Graham, continues to puzzle over who, if anyone, should be brought to justice over mountains of evidence and allegations of torture. The chief difficulty that continues to stymie Holder is the problem of credit assignment. Who in the world can he possibly indict? And where the heck in the complex and confusing chain of command would one begin? If only some whistle-blower had the courage of his convictions to step forward and start naming names, to heck with the reprisals and damn the torpedoes, that would make Holder’s daunting problem that much easier.
The ideal whistle-blowing candidate would, say, be in a relevant inside position of great power, say a vice-president or member of the National Security Council, perhaps an unrepentant and hardcore advocate of war crimes himself, who might even be prone to talking smack about his reluctant prosecutors at around 3:02 & 7:38 in a hypothetical video of a hypothetical exclusive interview. Moreover, in a perfect world, our ideal whistler-blower, being a powerful and disgusting beast, would arrogantly broadcast his claims on national TV for the entire world to hear unequivocally, say, at around 14:13 of our hypothetical video, who was responsible for these disgraceful, unspeakable crimes. Then, imagine if that criminal horror show of a person was figuratively begging to be prosecuted.
Unfortunately, even being associated with torture, much less promoting and authorizing it, carries such a stigma (not to mention criminal penalties) because it is so beyond acknowledged pales, brinks and verges of civilized behavior even in a time of war that no one in their right mind would ever associate themselves with such cruel and indifferent barbarism.
Let’s hope and pray for Assistant Attorney General Eric Holder’s exasperated and irritated ganglionic eminences that an answer to his baleful and piteous pleadings and puzzlements avails itself soon in his desperate search for justice.
19 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
made to understand that this is not a matter of opinion.
The Cheneyites have tried to make a mockery of the law, and the corporate press dutifully goes along with Cheney’s ongoing efforts to turn this into a matter of opinion, wherein his holding a differing opinion is something to take pride in. The mockery is in that if you agree with their position, the laws on torture are meaningless.
The facts are not, however, open to dispute by any reasonable informed person.
The U.S. is bound by multiple ratified treaties and laws that clearly make waterboarding illegal. It is so illegal that we executed Japanese war criminals for doing it.
So one question is, how and why does our press let people like Cheney get away with this? Their willful misleading of the American people is the kind of thing that lets weasels like Holder and Obama talk about “moving forward” as opposed to what their legal duty is as officeholders.
And all this time I thought he wasn’t thinking about it at all…
Thanks for the head’s up.
eeyugh thanks for this essay CF, and the vid. I couldnt watch.
WTF. So its his opinion…. well, tough fucking shit its against the law. Wht if all criminals were treated liket his? “Gee, Officer, I just happen to be of the opinion that beating my wife to within an inch of her life b/c she left the butter out…. is actually effective, so therefore not a crime, so let me just go on tv and brag about it, and tell others what a great tactic it is and they should do it too. What? Whats that you say? Its proven to not even be effective? Huh. Well, who cares. My idea’s still right. So its okay.”
of water boarding” Dick Cheney
What say instead of spending the Justice Department’s resources on DOMA, defending that law by comparing gay people to pedophiles and harem owners and people who wish to marry their brother or sister, they spend those resources investigating people who actually tortured, or condoned torturing others?
After all, the Justice Department’s entire (false) claim of defending DOMA in court was that this administration was going to respect the law and was bound to respect the law as it concerns DOMA (as opposed to, ya know, doing what has been done in the past with these kinds of laws, merely recognizing they’re fucking unconstitutional and refusing to fight them).
But I recognize that there are limits to prosecutorial resources.
So I guess my question is, is it more of a threat to the welfare of the Republic if high up muckety mucks are allowed to break the law at will and act like royalty, or is it more important in a resource sense if Rob and Bill want to get married? It would seem from what we have seen that the Justice Department gets in the news for the latter more than it gets in the news for the former. Why is that?
Oh, and of course, there are all those white collar criminals and identity thieves I talked about in my last diary.
So it might be a good operative question as to why Attorney General Holder’s office is so damn vigorous in preventing Rob and Bill from getting married — so busy it has to call them enablers of pedophiles and polygamous marriage and incest in merely trying to lawfully create a union between two people for the purpose of caring for each other — while at the same time the Justice Department is apparently too busy to investigate and prosecute white collar corporate fraud and war criminals?
If it is too busy, maybe it can stop persecuting gay people and start working on actual master criminals that make life for all of us a living hell?
I know, I know, silly me.
needs to hire Inspector Clouseau. Or Inspector Gadget. Either one would be an improvement over the sleuthing ability of Holder.
Afterall, it was all their fault in the first place. If they hadn’t of been a muslim, Bush/Cheney wouldn’t have had to torture them in the first place. Yep, hang the tortured.