As the Bush Torture Crime Unravels, the Monstrous Evil of the Criminal Bush Administration Is Exposed
As the war crime of torture that the memos have clearly indicated were a policy of the criminal Bush regime with the subsequent tap dancing by the Obama administration in order to avoid the obligation to prosecute as the Constitutions, treaties and other rules of law demand, there are two excellent postings that distill the criminal issue to its essence, exposing the deliberate obfuscation by Bushites and other members of the GOP in order to try and hide the fact that torture was, is, and remains a crime.
The first comes from Zachary Roth at TPM Muckraker and includes a video:
"Jonathan Turley, the media-friendly George Washington Law School professor, who's an outspoken advocate of curbing executive power, gave a bravura performance on MSNBC'sCountdown last night, on the subject of possible torture prosecutions.
"Arguing that investigations aren't just necessary but long overdue, Turley made two important points that have been getting a bit lost in the rapid-fire debate lately.
"First, he said, there's a huge difference between an investigation conducted by Congress or a bipartisan commission, on the one hand, and the appointment of a special prosecutor by the Justice Department, on the other. The former approach is likely to repeat the mistakes of the 9/11 Commission, in which Washington insiders largely ensured that there were no major political repercussions. Only the latter approach, he said, will ensure genuine accountability.
"Second, Turley lamented the way that the Washington debate has lately centered on the issue of whether the DOJ lawyers who wrote the memos -- John Yoo, Steven Bradbury, and Jay Bybee, among others -- will face prosecution. But a full investigation, of course, should focus on those who ordered the polices -- including, if necessary, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, and others -- not just the lawyers who produced the legal rationale for it.
"Of course, Turley's advice will almost certainly not be followed. But it's worth keeping his views in mind as a baseline of what, in an ideal world, should be happening."
"With the release of the U.S. Senate's report on the Bush Administration torture program, it is now incontrovertibly clear – and officially established by the highest, most respectable Establishment institutions – that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and a host of other top officials deliberately, willingly, and with malice aforethought, established a system of interrogation using brutal techniques that they knew were against the law. Hence the need for the torture memos that attempted to give retroactive legal cover for atrocities that were already taking place at the orders of the White House and the Pentagon. They were also told repeatedly that these tortures were ineffective at producing useful intelligence.
"What's more, it is now undeniable that they began this program long before they had captured even one "high-profile al Qaeda detainee," and that they were using these heinous techniques not in a desperate bid to save the nation from further attacks – which has long been their preening, self-serving claim – but instead to produce spurious data about the non-existent link between Iraq and al Qaeda. In other words, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld ordered their minions to beat and torment captives in order to get them to say something – anything – that could then be used to "justify" a war of aggression that these grand statesmen had been planning long before the September 11 attacks.
"You cannot disentangle the torture program from the war of aggression in Iraq – nor from the illegal wiretapping program, the corrupt war profiteering, and all the other degradations of liberty and law that have been so accelerated in the past eight years. They are all of a piece, part and parcel of a plan to expand and entrench America's "unipolar domination" of world affairs with a thoroughly militarized state led by an unaccountable, authoritarian "Unitary Executive."
"This is one reason why Barack Obama is so obviously reluctant to tug on the torture thread too hard. If you tear it out, with full-scale prosecutions and top officials locked up behind bars, the whole rotten skein would fall apart. Once you start genuinely subjecting government officials – including security apparatchiks and military brass – to the full extent of the law, there would be no end to the unraveling: senators, contractors, representatives, bureaucrats, generals, lobbyists, judges, corporate chiefs – the whole edifice of Establishment power would be shaken to the core as its leading lights went down, one after the other.
"Thus the mere act of applying the ordinary, bourgeois laws of the land as they stand right now would constitute a world-shaking revolution, an overthrow of the existing order every bit as radical as any ideologue's dream of mass uprising. It would be, in effect, a re-founding of the Republic – and the end of the empire, which cannot survive without continual war, lawless rule and endless corruption.
"And that's why we will not see Barack Obama follow such a course. He might, in the end, have to pull much harder on the torture thread than he wants to; as we noted yesterday, a few upper-level middlemen might have to be offered up as scapegoats to quell the PR tempest. But he has already demonstrated, over and over, that he has no intention or desire to unravel the skein of imperial power. Indeed, he is trying to strengthen that skein and bind it more tightly, as we have seen in his various court cases seeking to uphold or even expand authoritarian powers claimed by Bush, in his escalation of the Afghan war, in his continual expansion of attacks in Pakistan, in his servile coddling and protection of the CIA, and in his celebration of the "success" and "extraordinary achievement" of the war crime in Iraq.
"Ironically, the torture issue that he is so desperately trying to shake off his hands is in fact the one opportunity for the historical greatness that Obama – and his ardent fans – obviously yearn for. It holds forth the best chance – the last chance? – for dismantling the imperial machine of brutality and corruption, and starting anew. But he would not be where he is today if he were the kind of man to see – and seize – such an opportunity.
"He will let it go – and all hope for change, for renewal, for a re-founded Republic, will go with it."
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