( – promoted by buhdydharma )
Turning the innocent, not only those who were grabbed and held for years but their countrymen and women, into potential foreign criminal terrorist, not winning hearts and minds and not being the law abiding country we not only claim but attack others for doing same!
April 9: According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former President George Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld knew that many of the detainees held at the prison at Guantanamo Bay were innocent, and did nothing to stop their torture.
George W. Bush ‘knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent’
What the Detainee Treatment Act Really Means for Guantanamo Detainees
We as a Country are already going to live with the results of the extremely failed policies done in Our Names for the coming decades, but if we don’t try and minimize that blowback by seeking the Justice we supposedly espouse the potential for that blowback grows even more dangerous and destructive!
Some, like Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, recognize the implications for this country and it’s citizens, some!
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“We as a Country are already going to live with the results of the extremely failed policies done in Our Names for the coming decades, but if we don’t try and minimize that blowback by seeking the Justice we supposedly espouse the potential for that blowback grows even more dangerous and destructive!”
What part of that statement (perfect composition, btw) do people not understand, starting from the top.
I wonder in disbelief how the president can not see how looking back, is the only way forward.
It keeps building into a procrastination that will eventually be impossible to reverse & we will be looking at a history of two war criminal presidents, one an idiot puppet, the other a constitutional scholar, though eventually I fear, indistinguishable one from the other.
I saw that on “Countdown” a few days ago & couldn`t help but wondering if I had heard correctly about Powel seemingly putting down the veracity of Wilkerson`s statement.
What`s your thought on my take on that, please.
This has been known for some time now, but, I’m glad it’s all “coming alive” again and, hopefully, receiving even a greater “broadcast” and recognition.
Most of these people who wound up in Guantanamo, were either victims of large “sweeps” or those “given away” for a bounty. I think we, in the blogosphere, have always known, long before Wilkerson, that so many of these souls were, indeed, innocent.
But the unthinkable of all unthinkables, is that we would TORTURE and detain those endlessly, who we KNEW were INNOCENT. These are war crimes that go beyond the International explanation of war crimes, I believe.
Thank you, as always, jimstaro!
…. “blowback” indeed.
The failure of the Dawn Johnsen nomination is a case in point. Obama is not interested in truth and reconciliation, and his failure to support his nominee points that out. bmaz has a terrific post about Johnsen’s nomination failure up on emptywheel: http://emptywheel.firedoglake…. There’s also Glenn Greenwald’s excellent piece on the very same topic: http://www.salon.com/news/opin…
I have finally come to the reluctant conclusion that Obama is even more corporatist than Hillary, and that in the long run it really did not matter which of them got the nomination. I’ve given this president the benefit of the doubt for over a year now. But his administration’s mishandling of the Johnsen nomination makes it very plain that there will be no remediation of the illegal Bush/Cheney abuses of power and violations of the Constitution. This is a tragedy, for it means that the guarantees we’ve had under the Constitution are dying before our eyes and that we will continue our new role as the international neighborhood bully.
We can’t blame the undermining of the Constitution and the corruption of our government and legal processes on the Republicans any more. I’m strongly tempted to make this point over at GOS, knowing I will be flamed into oblivion. But the sooner progressives and liberals face this fact, the sooner we can start pushing back. No one over there wants to hear it, BWD’s swan song notwithstanding. Eventually, however, they are going to have to face reality: We’ve. Been. Had.