In an interview with Raw Story, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) denounced President Barack Obama for blocking any investigation or prosecution of torture under the Bush Administration as inviting ‘tyranny.”
Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. correctly said that the Obama Administration had endangered the very premise of the “supremacy of laws” in its refusal to prosecute Bush officials.
The Obama Administration could not risk a full investigation because the evidence of torture would likely have resulted in indictments of former officials, including President George Bush and Dick Cheney. Instead, President Obama decided to ignore our clear international obligations to investigate and prosecute torture — which allowed Bush officials to go public with boasts of how they waterboarded suspects and would do it again.
Source: Rawstory
Tootie
That’s a load off. Let’s hope they don’t become dastardly Democrats anytime soon. You don’t think they will, do you? I really don’t need anything else to worry about right now!
buckeye: I presume Beck and Limbaugh would go to jail since they don’t possess Ivy league degrees (and if they were president and if they were in charge of various and sundry slaughters, starvation, and mutilations).
Hope that clears things up a bit.
Forgot the URL;
http://equalpartyusa.wordpress.com/
Here’s a possibility come 2012, go over his platform and HOW to overcome the 2 party system…………nows the time to get started.
Jill posted the following:
From wikileaks:
“Real change begins Monday in the WashPost. By the years end, a reformation. Lights on. Rats out.”
____
Thanks for this, Jill. I heard about part of the story on MSNBC this morning. What’s going on is obscene, cruel and criminal. Good, decent, law-abiding people are being targeted and harassed, among other things.
Perhaps this will be the beginning of the unraveling.
I think you may be onto something here, Tootie.
President Bush has a B.A. from Yale and a M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. And VP Cheney has a (B.A/M.B.A) from the University of Wyoming.
It’s obvious to me, as you indicate, “Apparently, in America a prestigious degree is a free pass to torture and kill Americans and get away with it”. I wonder why no one else has had this insight.
Now on the other hand, Glen Beck only has a high school degree from Sehome High School in Bellingham, WA. And Rush Limbaugh doesn’t even have a high school degree.
I would assume, following your logic, that either of these famous Americans would make a better President. Or am I on the wrong track once again? It’s so confusing…
Bill Clinton received his Juris Doctor when he became a prestigious graduate from Yale. That must mean he is virtuous, wise, and incapable of torturing others. David Koresh, call your office. Oh wait, he is dead. Never mind.
Yet Clinton, and his little hand-maid Madeleine Albright, would seal the fate of 500,000 starving Iraqi children until they died. Tsk tsk and ho hum. Nobody cares. It doesn’t hurt to starve to death espeically if you are a child. They didn’t have prestigious college degrees anyway, so, who cares.
Democrats did not flinch, have not flinched, and will they ever flinch? Not likely. Why should they care about starving 500,000 Iraqi children to death when they don’t even care about 48 million genetically unique human organisms (soon to be born) snuffed out in the womb? These would have been their own countrymen. 500,000 dead Iraqi children are a trivial matter to these folks.
I saw Martin Luther King’s grand-daughter (or was it his niece?) on Glenn Beck over the weekend. She made a poignant point. She wants reparations all right, but it’s not what you think. She wants reparations from Planned Parenthood. You know, the guilty party who has hurt blacks. She thinks living persons should “repair” what evils they have done currently to others. And so she is opposed to innocent descendants paying for what guilty ancestors did (like innocent persons today paying for slavery long past).
Planned Parenthood was founded for the purpose of eliminating people, like, say, blacks, from America. She hasn’t forgotten this and she wants them to pay for the loss to the black population by Planned Parenthood.
Heh heh. Justice bites.
She remembers that abortion strikes blacks at a higher rate than whites and every other group, and she knows who the current guilty parties of this slaughter are. I’m thinking about writing to her to tell her who is responsible for blacks’ high illiteracy rate. Most blacks in prison are functionally illiterate and there is only one group of people responsible for that: democrats/unions/NEA.
Reparations indeed.
Anyway, back to the subject.
Clinton will get off scott-free especially if his wifey is prez.
In fact many democrats, who wound up getting hundreds of thousands of Americans slaughtered and maimed in their demented interventionist wars, graduated from prestigious universities. It takes having a prestigious college degree to get away with torture, maiming, and murder.
Woodrow Wilson sent tens of thousands off to slaughter and trauma. This isn’t torture. No, indeed not. It’s only torture when you are the “enemy” and are maimed for no just cause. When it is your fellow countrymen it is OKAY.
Then there was FDR. He was a real peach. Again, he is another democrat who graduated from a “prestigious” university. This time Harvard. He lied his way to war last century. Hundreds of thousands of US citizens perished and were maimed. This ain’t torture either because these are not enemies. It isn’t murder because he had a prestigious college degree at an institution leftists admire.
FDR made the world safe for democracy. Oh yes. I’m so safe. Thank you.
Apparently, in America a prestigious degree is a free pass to torture and kill Americans and get away with it.
Of course, Abraham Lincoln is an exception. He was, first, a republican, and next, he didn’t have a prestigious degree. But he got away with it too. Democrats really love him right now (he didn’t like blacks). But that is OKAY to them since he provides the template to justify torture and murder of Americans. That means a lot to democrats.
Lincoln was a monster who persecuted his critics, threw them in jail, ruined their careers, and sent his military on a rampage against women and children in the south (raping them, starving them, and burning down their homes). Oh how charming! No wonder democrats and leftists suddenly like him.
Sherman (West Point trained) said he should have been executed for what he was authorized to do to American civilians during the un-Civil War. Ho, and hum. It’s just another crazy American president torturing and murdering people.
Don’t take away Democrat fun and games, and hopes and dreams, just to score political points against Bush. That is so short-sighted. Think of all the Christians and republicans Democrats could torture and murder if Bush and Clinton get away with it like all the rest have.
buckeye,
If you’re serious about learning the truth, I gave you the places to look, and you’ll have to research this for yourself. Then you’re going to have to make your own informed decision.
wikileaks: “Real change begins Monday in the WashPost. By the years end, a reformation. Lights on. Rats out.”
Jill
OK. Give me the links and I’ll look at them. Nothing so far, though – as far as proof the Obama administration is torturing people, that is.
Perhaps we are both one of those people that see only what they want to see – not necessarily the whole truth.
You missed the information I gave you. Misrepresent things all you want because people who seek the truth will look right past misinformation and propaganda.
Jill
Yeah, I looked at them already.
The rest of Scott Horton’s “story”.
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2009/08/former_metairie_resident_joins.html
http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/04/16/37523-usace-official-in-afghanistan-goes-undercover-to-help-fbi-snare-contracting-cheats/
The others seem to be about Bush admin. or concern about the Obama administration’s refusal to release Bagram torture photos and/or denial of Bagram prisoners access to US courts. Scahill seems to be a Blackwater exposer.
Maybe you have other information I missed?
Buddha–
It’s sad that there are so few journalists like Greenwald that we can trust to tell us the truth.
**********
Remember Monica Goodling…another Bush attorney? She was a graduate of the prestigious Regent University Law School!
The Monica Goodling Report
(From Firedoglake)
By: emptywheel Monday July 28, 2008 7:47 am
http://firedoglake.com/2008/07/28/the-monica-goodling-report/
Excerpt:
The Department of Justice’s Inspector General’s Office has released another of its reports on the politicization of DOJ under Bush. This one ought to be called the Monica Goodling report, as it focuses on her litmus test hiring. I’ll post some updates on the details, but here is the conclusion:
In sum, the evidence showed that Sampson, Williams, and Goodling violated federal law and Department policy, and Sampson and Goodling committed misconduct, by considering political and ideological affiliations in soliciting and selecting IJs, which are career positions protected by the civil service laws.
Not only did this process violate the law and Department policy, it also caused significant delays in appointing IJs. These delays increased the burden on the immigration courts, which already were experiencing an increased workload and a high vacancy rate. EOIR Deputy Director Ohlson repeatedly requested candidate names to address the growing number of vacancies, with little success. As a result of the delay in providing candidates, the Department was unable to timely fill the large numbers of vacant IJ positions.
Elaine,
What I found especially galling was it was a Bush attorney laying a groundwork for a defense case. Some things are simply indefensible. You’re running the shop, you get the blame, plain and simple. The buck doesn’t stop with the guy holding the water hose. It stops with the guy who gave him the order and/or had the bad judgment to put people with criminal tendencies in such a position.
Here’s an interesting article on the NYT’s use of word “torture” from Glenn Greenwald.
The NYT’s nationalistic double standard
by Glenn Greenwald (Salon.com, 7/16/2010)
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/07/16/nyt/index.html
Excerpt:
Here’s a particularly illustrative example of how The New York Times’ editorial policy — it cannot be “torture” if the United States does it — obfuscates the truth and actively bolsters government propaganda. There are countless examples like this, but this one is unusually stark, especially since these two episodes occur within one day of each other:
From today’s article on how the CIA used tactics never authorized by the DOJ:
A former Bush Justice Department official who approved brutal interrogation methods by the C.I.A. has told Congress that he never authorized several other rough tactics reportedly inflicted on terrorism suspects — including prolonged shackling to a ceiling and repeated beatings.
So in NYT World, even shackling helpless detainees to the ceiling for prolonged periods and repeatedly beating them is not “torture,” but are rather merely “rough tactics” or “brutal interrogation methods” . . . if it’s high-level U.S. government officials who have authorized them. But, from a NYT article yesterday:
U.S. Court Orders Safety, Not Deportation, for Woman Facing Torture
By Nina Bernstein (7/15/2010)
[A] federal appeals court last week ordered the United States to provide a haven for a woman facing the likelihood of torture in China. . . . Others named in the same warrant and caught by the Chinese police had described beatings, suffocation, electric shocks, sleep deprivation and other forms of torture to get them to disclose details about the human rights group to which they all belonged.
Jill
Yeah, I looked at them already. No proof of Obama torture that I can see. Maybe you have other information I missed?
Scott Horton
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/11/target-of-obama-era-rendi_n_256499.html
The rest of Scott Horton’s “story”.
http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/04/16/37523-usace-official-in-afghanistan-goes-undercover-to-help-fbi-snare-contracting-cheats/
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2009/08/former_metairie_resident_joins.html
ACLU No Obama torture.
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/obama-administration-reverses-promise-release-torture-photos
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/obama-admin-seeks-deny-bagram-prisoners-access-us-courts
Andy Worthington No Obama torture
http://www.truth-out.org/calling-accountability-international-day-support-victims-torture60786
CCR No Obama torture
http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/arar-v-ashcroft
Amnesty International No Obama torture.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/053/2010/en
From wikileaks:
“Real change begins Monday in the WashPost. By the years end, a reformation. Lights on. Rats out.”
buckeye,
I already did that early in the thread. I am sure there is proof and the references I gave should do the trick.
Jill
No. I’m waiting for an answer to my previous post. I’ll reprint it here.
I am sure you have proof that Pres. Obama is continuing torture and making more of a grab for executive power than Bush/Cheney did, not just making those assertions, and I would appreciate your pointing me to a reputable source. Thanks, Buckeye.
Are you waiting for Bybee to be indicted because he admitted to authorizing waterboarding? Because he just admitted to authorizing a war crime, yet nothing is happening to him. I doubt he will either be impeached or even investigated, although by law he should be.
This is just a set up to go for a few people who over waterboarded–a show trial so Obama can say he and Holder really went after people who tortured outside the “law”. It’s another show for his supporters so they won’t look beneath the surface., They’ll be happy and keep their denial about what the law really says and who Obama really is.
Jill
I’m waiting.