David Lindorff, Counterpunch - At this point, President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder have all the evidence they need to confirm that torture was committed, and that it was authorized at the highest levels not just of the military and CIA, but of the White House. The president may not, under the law, simply say as he has in the past that the country is “moving on,” and that there will be no prosecutions. ACLU head Anthony Romero has suggested that, thanks to the broad power of the pardon vested in the presidency by the Constitution, Obama could pardon his predecessor and others in the Bush/Cheney administration who criminally authorized torture, and has argued that this might be a compromise action he could take. But that, according to international law expert Francis Boyle, a professor at the University of Illinois Law School in Chicago, would not only have zero impact on the fact that they are all in violation of international law. “It would also open the president to a charge of being an accessory to the fact,” he says, “because under the Geneva Convention on torture, the government, and in this case the president, is obligated to see that these crimes and criminals are prosecuted."
CNN’s Anderson Cooper compared U.S. operatives who employed enhanced interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists to Nazis and the dreaded Khmer Rouge.
2 comments:
One thing that everyone is missing is this.
This is not new.
The US supported and trained torture squads in Latin America for decades. The CIA trained these people, gave names and locations and let their local brethren do the rest.
In Latin America this simply is not a secret. Everyone knows it.
It is not a question of the US losing the moral high ground, that happened a long time ago. It is a question of that fact now being right out in the open and whether we are moral enough as a nation to do something about it.
My guess is that nothing gets done.
The errant stupidity of these people is exemplified by the fact that terrorists or non"symmetrical" fighters caught red-handed should die in place, whether tortured or not. It is outrageous to grant them the completely undeserved status of prisoners of war. Dead men tell no tales.
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