Tag: Eric Holder

Welcome to the 9th in the Dog’s letter writing campaign series. This series is dedicated to taking action (even if it is a small action) every week on the issue of torture. Here is how it works, each week the Dog writes a letter highlighting some aspect of the torture issue and making the point this requires investigation. The Dog sends these letters to the President, the Supreme Court, AG Holder, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid and Rep. John Conyers, the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Your part, if you chose to act is pretty easy. Simply cut and paste the letter and send it under your own name.  

Crossposted from Antemedius

Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon is recognized worldwide for his determination to bring suspects to justice, wherever they seek refuge or how old the crime.

A 2005 BBC profile of Garzon notes that:

He came to prominence in the late 1990s, when he campaigned for the extradition former Chilean military ruler Augusto Pinochet, from London to Spain for human rights abuses.

In late 2003 Judge Garzon compiled a 692-page indictment which called for the arrest of 35 men, including Osama Bin Laden, for their alleged membership of a terrorist group. The number of suspects was later increased to 41.

…

Mr Garzon is one of six investigating judges for Spain’s National Court which, like many other European countries, operates an inquisitorial system, as opposed to the adversarial system used by the US and UK.

The investigating judge’s role is to examine the cases assigned to him by the court, gathering evidence and evaluating whether the case should be brought to trial. He does not try the cases himself.

Today, April 30, 2009, Garzon opened a Spanish investigation into torture allegations against US military personnel at the Guantánamo detention centre:

Dear President Obama;

I watched your press conference last night. I was happy with the tone that you set about the N1H1 ’09 virus and thought you gave quite good advice. However that is not why I am writing you today. Mr. President I continue to be dismayed with your efforts to straddle the line on the issue of the Bush administrations apparent State Sponsored Torture program.  

This is the eighth in Dog’s letter writing campaign. For those joining us in the middle the basic idea is that each week the Dog creates a letter which you, the home audience can cut and paste and send to the following list of officials:

President Obama

AG Holder

Speaker Pelosi

Majority Leader Reid

Justices of the Supreme Court

Of course you can send it to your Senators and Representative as well, but the point is to get a steady drum beat of letters to these folks in the hopes that they will read some of them and take action on the issue of the Bush administrations State Sponsored Torture program.

This week’s letter is going to be addressed to AG Holder, with copies to all of the others.  

In “Reclaiming America’s Soul”, Paul Krugman rejects the arguments of torture apologists . . .

Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?

No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.  These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions – not out of vindictiveness, but because this is a nation of laws. We need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn’t about looking backward, it’s about looking forward – because it’s about reclaiming America’s soul.  

Via Big Tent Democrat, we get this, from CNN (emphasis mine):

Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday that he would “follow the law” as he weighed potential prosecutions of Bush administration officials who authorized controversial harsh interrogation techniques.

Big Tent points out that President Obama has already contradicted this, by stating that CIA interrogators won’t be investigated. But I’d also like to remind CNN that even John McCain understands the difference between “harsh interrogation techniques” and torture. So, why doesn’t CNN?

So now we have vented, we were appalled at the evil of the Bybee memo and the other memos justifying state sponsored torture of prisoners. Here on the internet our outrage has flared and been shared. This is an important aspect as we must make it clear how seriously the people of the Untied States take this issue, but now it is time to pull back a little. Now it might sound funny for the Dog to be saying this especially after the letter he wrote to the President yesterday, but let the old hound explain a little and you will see where he is going.

Cross posted at Square State

It’s been an emotional two days for those of us who don’t sleep well knowing our country almost certainly committed war crimes.  It’s a kneejerk issue for me — I’ll admit that without apology.  If America doesn’t hold its leaders accountable for torture, then it’s no longer my America.  And I love my America dearly.  Country aside, the core of my being is offended by the existence of torture in this world.  If some of my money bought waterboards, I now have a stake in the company.  Call it moralizing if you like, but I just can’t live with that.  And yes, I become very emotional.

But tonight, after an especially discouraging day, hope comes from the Rachel Maddow Show in the form of interviews with the estimable Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Michael Isikoff from Newsweek Magazine.  For me, sources don’t get much more reliable than Senator Whitehouse.

Sam Stein weighs in on Obama’s pre-approved, bipartisan-tested, generic excuse for not enforcing the law against BushCo criminals . . .

Asked for the first time to respond to the likelihood that Spanish prosecutors will target officials in the Bush administration for sanctioning torture at Guantanamo Bay, Barack Obama stressed, once again, that he prefers to look forward, not backward.  “I’m a strong believer that it’s important to look forward and not backwards, and to remind ourselves that we do have very real security threats out there,” said Obama.

I think it’s important to remind ourselves, Mr. President, that war criminals are still running around loose all over Washington D.C.  Their smug faces can still be seen on national television, they’re writing op-eds in the fucking Wall Street Journal, they’re getting million dollar book deals and are still wined and dined at Georgetown cocktail parties, while the victims of their war crimes can’t look forward to anything ever again because they’re dead, or are still in Gitmo, or have been shattered physically and psychologically by American torturers acting upon the orders of an American president and vice president, who paid American lawyers to tell them it was legal to violate the law, the Constitution, and the Geneva Conventions.

“Legal cover”, bought and paid for . . .

with 30 pieces of silver.

You want to focus on the very real threats “out there”, Mr. President?   I’m just a nobody who worked his ass off to help get you elected, but I think you need to focus on the very real threats to the Constitution and American democracy that are staring us all in the face right here in the United States.  Those very real threats are not “out there” in Afghanistan or Pakistan, they’re right here in America, entrenched in the CIA, the NSA and the Pentagon, they’re in those Wall Street banks you keep bailing out, they’re in the leadership and rank and file of that mindless cult of subversion, racism, and corporate fraud that used to be the Republican Party.

A dark, dark day for America.

“They were only following orders.” This is the opinion of Eric Holder, as offered in his statement today, describing the decision to release four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos. (The memos have just been posted, and link is here.)

And so the United States government, 64 years after the end of World War II, adopts the infamous slogan of “Befehl ist Befehl” (literally “orders are orders”), otherwise known as the Nuremberg Defense.

Furthermore, Holder pledges the U.S. government will defend any CIA torturers before any tribunal, domestic or international, pay any fines,  and make every effort to assert “any available immunities and other defenses”.

“It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department,” Holder said.

Welcome to the sixth of the Dog’s letter writing campaign series. The Dog usually posts these on Monday’s but his Step Dad was having major heart surgery and the Dog could not focus very well yesterday (he is fine BTW). The basic premise here is to, on a weekly basis; write a letter to the President, the Attorney General, the nine Justices of the Supreme Court, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid, urging them to investigate the apparent State Sponsored Torture program of the Bush Administration. In order to get their attention, every week the Dog writes from a different perspective about the issue, so that on the off chance that they read more than one of these letters it is clear that it is not the same thing over and over. This series also offers the reader the chance to write their own letter or cut and paste the Dog’s letter and send it in. The more people that we have sending weekly letters the higher chance that we will be heard on this issue, so if you could take the time to send this along it would be greatly appreciated.