Many of us have been alarmed by the obvious effort of the Obama staff to avoid any investigation of confirmed war crimes by the Bush Administration in the torture program. Obama and Attorney General nominee Eric Holder have been suggesting that a war crime investigation would be “uncivil” and “looking backwards.” It has not gone over well since torture is a crime under eight treaties and statutes. Now, General Michael V. Hayden claims that Obama secretly promised him that there would be no war crimes investigation or prosecution in a meeting in Chicago.
Hayden’s role in this growing controversy is particularly distressing for civil libertarians. Not only does it confirm signals coming from the Obama camp since the election, but Hayden has been a particularly dark figure in the unlawful surveillance and torture programs, including statements that have been criticized as knowingly misleading or outright false.
Hayden had a closed door meeting with Obama last month in Chicago. He said Obama made it clear that the Bush Administration and CIA staff have nothing to worry about. “He’s looking forward,” Hayden said, “and that’s very appropriate.” If true, it would be confirmation of a bait-and-switch by the democrats. For years, the Democrats insisted that they could not act on torture until they controlled Congress. Once they were given both houses of Congress, Democrats insisted that they could not do anything without control of the White House. When they won the White House, the Democrats insisted that there was not enough time before Inauguration. Now, they are insisting that they must “look to the future: and notably not to the war crimes in the immediate past.
Democrats believe that they have nothing to gain personally and politically from prosecuting war crimes. They have been trying to sell people on yet another meaningless commission as a substitute for prosecution.
Not surprisingly, Obama aides are denying the story, here.
Of course, there is a very easy way to dispel any such rumors. Obama simply needs to say that any war crimes will be investigated and, if evidence if found of such crimes, prosecuted. That is what it means when Obama and Holder repeatedly say “no one is above the law.” The fact that they have struggled to simply commit themselves to enforce the law is highly worrisome and only serves to confirm the Hayden story.
For the full story, click here.
Go ahead and attack, Clinger. That is your M.O. If I cared what crazy people think I’d still be married and I’d register Republican.
Some of here just think Clinger’s not worth addressing since he’s a contrarian and probably suffers from BPD (borderline personality disorder, not bi-polar disorder). The more you argue with a halfwit like this, the more they like it. This is evidenced by the above snarky smartass bullshit non-response. And it matters not what you say. They’ll take the opposite position just to piss you off. It turns them on. It’s part of their mental illness. Logic has nothing to do with it.
This kind of troll you kill through starvation.
Thought they didn’t get it??
Oh no.. Never… I know this is a lawyerly site and lawyers get everything… Don’t believe that… Just askem… Just waiting with baited breath for my award and ah feared I’d been forgot…
Mespo,
I think he has a similar theory about his arguments that I have about my jokes. If you aren’t persuaded, it’s because you didn’t get it.
The Clinger:
“A linear asymptote is essentially a straight line to which a graphed curve becomes closer and closer but does not become identical.”
***************
Thanks, I took calculus. I also took English.
mespo727272
asymptotic.
A linear asymptote is essentially a straight line to which a graphed curve becomes closer and closer but does not become identical.
Here’s info on the law and war crimes (found in Glenn Greenwald’s column of today):
UPDATE: Harper’s Scott Horton notes that the leading U.N. official in charge of torture conventions, such as the Convention Against Torture (signed by Ronald Reagan and ratified by the U.S. Senate), just stated that the Obama administration is obligated by that treaty and by international law to criminally investigate Bush officials for torture:
In an interview on Tuesday evening with the German television program “Frontal 21,” on channel ZDF Professor Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Rapporteur responsible for torture, stated that with George W. Bush’s head of state immunity now terminated, the new government of Barack Obama was obligated by international law to commence a criminal investigation into Bush’s torture practices.
“The evidence is sitting on the table,” he stated. “There is no avoiding the fact that this was torture.” He pointed to the U.S. undertakings under the Convention Against Torture in which the country committed that it would criminally prosecute anyone who tortured, or extradite the person to a state that would prosecute him. “The government of the United States is required to take all necessary steps to bring George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld before a court,” Nowak said.
Manfred Nowak, an internationally renowned law professor at the University of Vienna, currently serves as an independent expert for the United Nations looking at allegations of torture affecting member states. In 2006, he undertook a special investigation of conditions at the U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo in which he concluded that practices approved by the Bush Administration violated human rights norms, including the prohibition against torture.
Good article, Mr. Turley! There are just a few people that I admire, and you are surely one of them. I like my fellow citizens to be patriots and I hold a special affection for patriots! You’re in very good company: Dennis Kucinich, David Swanson, Glenn Greenwald, Ari Melber, and some I can’t name off the top of my head. Thank you for your enlightenment and keep up the good work in keeping us little bone cruncher’s aware. Godspeed.
mespo727272
Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link between the two great classes of society.
Now let me see. Tell me where I can find the information on the legal infractions that lawyers commit like when, where they have been disbarred and how many times they have been cited? Tried just local search and just general Google search but to no avail. Can I find this information as easily as I can on the say the Medical Profession or other professions?
Since the legal guys are so inclined to my representation would it not be reasonable to expect to easily find that info and to expect they would not convict me without a trial? Never had the occasion to search for a Lawyer (Yet) but I can easily find this info on physicians.
Seems the only lawyers I have heard about being convicted were a couple of tort lawyers, was it in New Orleans where they or he was bribing judges? Those guys that get lump sums through class action suits in the multimillions and their clients get a few bucks. I will reserve comment about the aristocracy. But it is so hard to do so…
Thanks in advance for your source….
mespo727272
I question whether democratic institutions could long be maintained; and I cannot believe that a republic could hope to exist at the present time if the influence of lawyers in public business did not increase in proportion to the power of the people. “
You guys in pin strip suits, wing tip shoes, carrying leather brief cases nd actionable words and pontifications missed OBL. Ya forgot there were some others in the mix that shoulda been a part of the effort but then those dudes are not so eloquent in word or missive and are thus rendered and hidden in the embarrassment wood shed.
You can have all the laws and lawyers you want and unless and until the citizens recognize the rule of law the community is without law. Just about the time Arafat died I completed “April 1865, the Month that Saved America.” I was surprised to find that Lee ignored his staff’s advice to not surrender at Appomattox and suggested he order his Army to melt into the countryside and continue a guerrilla war. Lee understand he would win that battle but lose the war because he would have a citizenry that after a time was not inclined toward the rule of law and thus he surrendered and here we are with a black president. Arafat did not understand that and look where that whole Middle Eastern area is and those that on this post or anywhere else who convict or imply convictions before a process do not endorse what the de Tocqueville quote you provided conveyed.
“If you use laws to direct people and punishments to control them, they will merely try to evade the laws, and they will have no sense of shame. But if by virtue you guide the…there will be a sense of shame and the right.” Confucius
Same goes with business too… Its bigger than the lawyers and the government. And I know fer sure who don’t wonna believe that…
Yep Susan Crawford was quite the ideologue for admitting that we tortured Mohammed al-Qahtani at Gitmo to get his confession — a Republican ideologue, that is.
Yep.. It is so easy as I sit in my warm comfortable chair enjoying the white wintry scene having discussions with individuals with Premature Cognitive Commitment complimented by the human emotion “elevation” ,however, I am even more comfortable that I do not carry the burden of protecting a nation’s citizens from some dark unknown. That too many of these citizens are unappreciative or understand the complexities of that effort is most evident but knowing that such musings will be in competition for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest does help. On 9/11, because of a basic understanding of metallurgy I suspected the towers steel structures modulus of elasticity was being severely altered by fire and I hesitatingly anticipated that the twin towers would fall. That the agencies responsible for preventing and anticipating that event were a failure was not a surprise because such is the history of governmental bureaucracies and military plans, failure. But now I find those same bureaucrats making judgments on individuals who are not always afforded anything but the time to react rather than debate and moreover, are not held accountable to anticipate and insure that such events or worse events do not occur. A Navy Seal recounted the decision by his team to not kill and release two Afghans and suspected Taliban that walked upon and discovered their team’s location. A short time later the Seal Team was assaulted by more than 100 Taliban and he debates to this day that maybe he/they should have killed these individuals and by doing his other three team members would not have been killed. He would be in jail but his team mates might still be alive.
Mohammed al-Qahtani arrived in the US Aug 2002 with a one way plane ticket, little cash and was deported back to Saudi Arabia by a suspicious Orland, FL immigration official who did not believe his story. He was later captured on an Afghanistan battlefield and then sent to Gitmo. With decades of Dem pontificating about the threat of Saddam with WMD one can only be a Monday morning quarterback and with the propensity to not consider the fog of the war or the urgency of the moment or other Intel that suggest some major event or events in progress. The accounts of this individual I have read depict restraints only when he was pulling out IV and or disruptive behavior that required MPs to react to that aggression. To presuppose and assign accusations does not do justice to those that are at the actionable scene where debate is not always the alternative. I find that discussion entirely disingenuous.
Clinger:
If you really want a relevant de Tocqueville passage on my profession, here it is:
“The government of democracy is favorable to the political power of lawyers; for when the wealthy, the noble, and the prince are excluded from the government, the lawyers take possession of it, in their own right, as it were, since they are the only men of information and sagacity, beyond the sphere of the people, who can be the object of the popular choice. If, then, they are led by their tastes towards the aristocracy and the prince, they are brought in contact with the people by their interests. They like the government of democracy without participating in its propensities and without imitating its weaknesses; whence they derive a twofold authority from it and over it. The people in democratic states do not mistrust the members of the legal profession, because it is known that they are interested to serve the popular cause; and the people listen to them without irritation, because they do not attribute to them any sinister designs. The lawyers do not, indeed, wish to overthrow the institutions of democracy, but they constantly endeavor to turn it away from its real direction by means that are foreign to its nature. Lawyers belong to the people by birth and interest, and to the aristocracy by habit and taste; they may be looked upon as the connecting link between the two great classes of society.
The profession of the law is the only aristocratic element that can be amalgamated without violence with the natural elements of democracy and be advantageously and permanently combined with them. I am not ignorant of the defects inherent in the character of this body of men; but without this admixture of lawyer-like sobriety with the democratic principle, I question whether democratic institutions could long be maintained; and I cannot believe that a republic could hope to exist at the present time if the influence of lawyers in public business did not increase in proportion to the power of the people. “
mespo727272
Golly… Now we are witnessing the professions you hold in such contempt. Techies and military types and possibly conservatives and/or Republicans? That De Tocqueville musta turned ya red with a bit of rage included…. Gets that way when its not all about words/theory and debating …
How bout my ATP pilots license… Does that make three counts again me?
“Understanding the desire to distinguish oneself as essentially political because the goods of this world, even the intellectual joys of understanding never give total satisfaction or repose. He said “Theory itself is a sort of activity fraught with restiveness, and as such not surely superior to action.”” Alexis De Tocqueville
mespo727272
is may be the worst sentence I have ever read. Flushed with purple prose and highfalutin language, you prove my point that expertise in a technical field grants you no credentials in my generalist profession, and apparently doesn’t improve one’s English skills either. I’m sending this along to the judges of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I think I might win!
Thank You… Let me know if you/I win…
The Clinger:
“So as your worldly view suffers from you personal interpretation of your own largeness your forte to determine a profession nears not the asymptote of my profession.”
**********
This may be the worst sentence I have ever read. Flushed with purple prose and highfalutin language, you prove my point that expertise in a technical field grants you no credentials in my generalist profession, and apparently doesn’t improve one’s English skills either. I’m sending this along to the judges of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I think I might win!
Clinger, line von Clausewitz, recognizes only the law of the jungle. Dealing with you as an individual is time consuming and tends to humanize an opponent,and as every good Clausewitzian knows, is bad for the fighting spirit. Consider:
Again you do as the the Greeks did to determine the number of teeth in a horse’s mouth, debate and not open the book, eh mouth. If you had opened the book you would know how ridiculous you conclusion is….
Do you watch sports? Football??? Socker??? Ever go to a socker game in Europe?
Ever hear of irregular warfare??
mespo727272
Military types always seem to think that war is some unique human condition divorced from politics –it isn’t. They also think that expertise in war somehow qualifies them to opine about the human interaction within a society during those lulls between wars known as peace. Clearly a case of an expert claiming expertise on a topic he knows little about. History is strewn with the carcasses of flag rank military leaders who failed miserably as peacetime leaders: Grant, Johnson, Garfield — just in our own country. That is why our Constitution embodies civilian control of our “dogs of war.”
Being kind and not calling it as I really see the comment above and all that follows that missive as <0 and a prime example of the lofty pontifications of the Greek Philosophers and Politicians so infatuated by themselves. Carl Sagan wrote that the Mesopotamian culture lived more easily than did the Greek culture and did so because the Mesopotamia’s were students of science while the Greeks were the victims of words and lofty pontifications. While the Pythagorean theorem was developed by the Greeks culture apparently the Mesopotamian unlike the Greeks used science and as an electrical engineer I have benefited and had occasion to facilitate and use the methods developed from that basic theorem. So as your worldly view suffers from you personal interpretation of your own largeness your forte to determine a profession nears not the asymptote of my profession.
And by the way the “dogs or war” was theoretically held in check by the Possee comitatus act and soldiers fear politicians more than the enemy. One has certain expectations of the enemy but of the politician it it what is in vogue.
“I have only seen ad homen and anecdotal comments supporting condemning/prosecuting the Bush administration and ideologues are the source.”
********
Yep Susan Crawford was quite the ideologue for admitting that we tortured Mohammed al-Qahtani at Gitmo to get his confession — a Republican ideologue, that is.
I don’t presume to tell you what you’ve done and how you feel, don’t tell me what I’ve done or how I feel. I treat you as an individual, please return the favor. You see, I am an individual, not a faceless clone of some primordial “liberal.” I’m not even a Democrat. I don’t think it’s o.k. to lie to grand jury, or to hide bribes in your freezer. So take your baseless assumptions elsewhere, and speak to me as a person, not an ideology.
Gyges
The country is littered with Conservatives held accountable. Nixon was forced to resign because his fellow Republican’s told him to get outta dodge, Duke Cunningham is serving time is and will be forever in disgrace with the right, Gingrich was basically forced to resign, his replacement was also forced to resign, and the dude in FL for sextexting pages was run outta dodge and told not to come back. When and where have the Dems been held accountable or in jail and to the same standard they suggest for the conservatives been sought and administered to their own? What about Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorn or Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden and then there is the prostration ring run out of a congressman’s basement. Why are they courted and not condemned? I am inclined to believe these individuals would not be supported by the right. Please note I said inclined because then there is Larry Craig. I will support no one who commits crimes and for that continued policy the Republicans are better for having done so..
And by the by did you not imply that I supported illegal acts? I have only seen ad homen and anecdotal comments supporting condemning/prosecuting the Bush administration and ideologues are the source.
Gyges:
Clinger, line von Clausewitz, recognizes only the law of the jungle. Dealing with you as an individual is time consuming and tends to humanize an opponent,and as every good Clausewitzian knows, is bad for the fighting spirit. Consider:
“All war presupposes human weakness, and seeks to exploit it.”
– Karl von Clauswitz, On War, 1832
BTW I have no idea how this applies to the Dems or anybody else. It seems to me to be the old bromide that “war is hell” and that you candy-ass thinker types need to move out of the way while we tough guys duke it out with our own rules. Who says we don’t still live with the Neanderthals?