(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Anybody remember this?
Obama said that as president he would indeed ask his new Attorney General and his deputies to “immediately review the information that’s already there” and determine if an inquiry is warranted — but he also tread carefully on the issue, in line with his reputation for seeking to bridge the partisan divide. He worried that such a probe could be spun as “a partisan witch hunt.” However, he said that equation changes if there was willful criminality, because “nobody is above the law.”
The question was inspired by a recent report by ABC News, confirmed by the Associated Press, that high-level officials including Vice President Dick Cheney and former Cabinet secretaries Colin Powell, John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld, among others, met in the White House and discussed the use of waterboarding and other torture techniques on terrorism suspects.
Or this
Turley: Obama ‘owns’ Bush ‘war crimes’ if he looks the other way
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Raw Story
Tuesday, January 13, 2009President George W. Bush’s offhand acknowledgement in an interview Sunday with Fox’s Brit Hume that he personally authorized the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed may create thorny legal and moral problems for incoming President Barack Obama.
Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Monday, “We now have President Bush speaking quite candidly that he was in the loop, we have Dick Cheney who almost bragged about it. The question for Barack Obama is whether he wants to own part of this by looking the other way.”
Obama told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, “We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn’t mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation’s going to be to move forward.”
All most bragged about it? How about admitted it. Not only did the media “yawn”, so did the Obama and the Justice Department
“I was a big supporter of waterboarding,” Cheney told Karl, as if he were issuing a challenge to officials in the current administration, including President Barack Obama, who said flatly last year that waterboarding is torture, to take action against him. “I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques…”
The former vice president’s declaration closely follows admissions he made in December 2008, about a month before the Bush administration exited the White House, when he said he personally authorized the torture of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved the waterboarding of three so-called “high-value” prisoners.
“I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” Cheney said in an interview with the right-wing Washington Times about the waterboarding, a drowning technique where a person is strapped to a board, his face covered with a cloth and then water is poured over it. It is a torture technique dating back at least to the Spanish
Now there is this
Live Terrorists Are Worth More Than Dead Ones: Celestine Bohlen
The Obama administration has stepped up these kinds of remote-control bombardments, launching at least 64 drone strikes within Pakistan in its first 13 months; in its last three years, the Bush administration unleashed 41, according to an analysis by the New America Foundation.
The U.S. doesn’t like to think of itself as being in the assassination business, which is why the preferred term is “targeted killings.” Either way, this growing practice involves large legal and moral questions that should loom large, but don’t — not compared with the outcry over coercive interrogation or extraordinary renditions.
How many terrorists have been killed? How many innocent civilians? The CIA program is shrouded in secrecy, and therefore virtually unaccountable. Information about the strikes is often second-hand; mistakes aren’t always reported. One study, published last May, cited Pakistani sources who claim more than 700 civilians have been killed by drones, or 50 civilians for every terrorist — a shocking ratio that explains why public opinion in Pakistan is so outraged.
Pres. Obama has now OK’d the targeting of American citizen’s merely on allegations that they are members of so-called terrorist organizations.
Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair acknowledged Wednesday that government agencies may kill U.S. citizens abroad who are involved in terrorist activities if they are “taking action that threatens Americans.”
Blair told members of the House intelligence committee that he was speaking publicly about the issue to reassure Americans that intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense “follow a set of defined policy and legal procedures that are very carefully observed” in the use of lethal force against U.S. citizens.
From Glen Greenwald on Jan 17, 2010 who says it best
Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose “a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests.” They’re entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration’s policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges — based solely on the President’s claim that they were Terrorists — produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn’t Obama’s policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind — not imprisoned, but killed — produce at least as much controversy?
(all emphasis in quotes is mine)
Legal Procedures? What is legal about assassinations? What is legal about using an unmanned drone to target and kill so-called terrorists that also slaughter by-standers?
Obama not only owns Bush’s war crimes, he adds to them.
No, I am NOT ready to make nice.
25 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
and prosecuting the criminals, all of them.
versus over here if they are “suspected terrorists”?
I mean, I see no difference as to the principle of the thing.
So, is the difference because it would look bad? Why the distinction between murdering Americans internationally versus domestically?
for protests.
“I never lie, and I’m always right. And you can believe me.”
That’s apparently good enough for most Americans.
Whatever the problem is, it was those bullies at
CommieHajjie Martyrs, that’s who.All of these horrid practices carried out are illegal, domestically and internationally. Horrid and asinine! What sufficient facts have we to be assured that the drones are targeting the absolute “enemies?” Of course, we don’t, no more than most of those we’ve held in Guantanamo all these years, without being charged, were guilty of anything more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We have simply become a totally immoral, lawless, Constitutionally “lost” country that does exactly as it pleases, thus far with no consequences, leaving way for the likes of “Dick” Cheney and his daughter, Ms. Cheney, to go about media-land espousing the tremendous benefits and rewards of detention and torture to the American public — while, at the same time, attempting to “mutate” Cheney’s war criminal status, as though non-existent.
would be an error. To make nice would be to condone the evil and lawlessness.
Because the Illuminati owns Obama.