Disgusted

By Cernig

I'm disgusted. Yesterday the incumbent President of the United States casually admitted to ordering torture and only then ordering legal advisors to cook something up to cover his and his officials' asses...and instead the media and bloggers are following after a bunch of rich snobs telling them they should pile on Obama for being a rich snob.

I'm not the only one feeling this way.

Let me ask you something - why aren't Clinton, Obama and the tortuous flip-flopper McCain all over Bush for this? Do you really want to elect President Schultz?

Update Via our tireless researcher Kat comes an interview at DemocracyNow! with Phillipe Sands, international lawyer at the firm Matrix Chambers, Professor of Law and Director of the Centre of International Courts and Tribunals at University College London and author of The Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values:

AMY GOODMAN: Philippe Sands, the memo that came out this week that endorsed assault, maiming, even administering mind-altering drugs, the document suggests US interrogators would be immune from prosecution for any crime because of the President’s wartime authority. What about the possibility of war crimes being filed against the highest levels of the Bush administration, and how high would those levels go?

PHILIPPE SANDS: Well, that argument is complete rubbish. When you violate an international criminal law, like the Geneva Convention or the Convention Against Torture, you expose yourself to the risk of criminal investigation or prosecution. That was dealt with by US federal law. In June 2006, the Supreme Court gave a judgment in a very famous, very important case called Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and they said the administration got it wrong. The administration, by deciding that no detainees had rights under Geneva, had violated US constitutional law.

Justice Anthony Kennedy put in a separate opinion. He was with the majority. And he opened the door to war crimes possibilities. He said this means that war crimes violations may well be investigated in relation to situations in which the Geneva Convention was not followed. The administration recognized the threat that it faced, and within three months it had adopted legislation in the Military Commissions Act which created an immunity for any person who was involved in the interrogation of al-Qahtani, as well as many other people. That immunity applies within the United States.

But, as I write in the article in Vanity Fair, it doesn’t go beyond the United States. And I describe in the Vanity Fair piece, in much more detail than in the book, the meetings I’ve had with a European judge and a European prosecutor, who basically said the fact that the US has created a domestic immunity significantly increases the prospects of international investigational prosecution, if any of these people set foot out of the country. And as the prosecutor said to me, that was a very stupid thing to do, to create an immunity.

JUAN GONZALEZ: So, in essence, your sense is that it’s a very real possibility that in the future some of the individuals involved could be exposed, at least in foreign countries, to prosecution for their acts?

PHILIPPE SANDS: I think it’s a real possibility. The judge and the prosecutor have asked me for all of my materials. They were not aware of the details. They were not aware of the immunity that had been granted. And I think what it does do, at the very least, is expose some of these individuals, including the lawyers who form part of what I’ve called the torture team, to the possibility of investigation, if they set foot—well, they’re going to be investigated irrespective of whether or not they set foot outside of the United States—the possibility of the tap on the shoulder, what happened to Senator Pinochet when he was in London, I think becomes a real risk in relation to some of the individuals at the top.

We can only hope.

Comments

[barrisj]

Cernig,
The Obama "elist" flap and the Bush copping to torture authorisation is in fact two sides of the same coin: deeply-held mythologies about fairness and equality, and the rule of law as prevailing ethos of "the American way". That the middle/working classes have been getting stuffed up the bum by Republican economic policies is and has been a no-go area for the enablers in the national media for years; just as the spectacle of a shit-eating imbecile advocating torture as a national policy who just happens to sit in the Oval Office also calls for mass ignorance on the part of opinion-makers. After all, this IS America, and such things JUST DON'T HAPPEN...q.e.d.

[Steve Hynd]

Agreed, barrisj. It's not just the media though. The myth and metaphor of America are far more "real" to many than the actual reality.

Regards, C

[barrisj]

BTW, in addition to the A Sullivan link supplied in the original posting, check out this rather lengthly and thoughtful piece by Sully on why he supports Obama...actually playing on the above themes in that "the myth" no longer is authenticated by "the reality", and he above all other candidates, past or present, understands that fundamental rethinks are mandated, not
merely a change of political parties...

Is Iraq Vietnam? Who really won in 2000? Which side are you on in the culture wars? These questions have divided the Baby Boomers and distorted our politics. One candidate could transcend them.

by Andrew Sullivan
Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters

The logic behind the candidacy of Barack Obama is not, in the end, about Barack Obama. It has little to do with his policy proposals, which are very close to his Democratic rivals’ and which, with a few exceptions, exist firmly within the conventions of our politics. It has little to do with Obama’s considerable skills as a conciliator, legislator, or even thinker. It has even less to do with his ideological pedigree or legal background or rhetorical skills. Yes, as the many profiles prove, he has considerable intelligence and not a little guile. But so do others, not least his formidably polished and practiced opponent Senator Hillary Clinton.
Obama, moreover, is no saint. He has flaws and tics: Often tired, sometimes crabby, intermittently solipsistic, he’s a surprisingly uneven campaigner.
A soaring rhetorical flourish one day is undercut by a lackluster debate performance the next. He is certainly not without self-regard. He has more experience in public life than his opponents want to acknowledge, but he has not spent much time in Washington and has never run a business. His lean physique, close-cropped hair, and stick-out ears can give the impression of a slightly pushy undergraduate. You can see why many of his friends and admirers have urged him to wait his turn. He could be president in five or nine years’ time—why the rush?
But he knows, and privately acknowledges, that the fundamental point of his candidacy is that it is happening now. In politics, timing matters. And the most persuasive case for Obama has less to do with him than with the moment he is meeting. The moment has been a long time coming, and it is the result of a confluence of events, from one traumatizing war in Southeast Asia to another in the most fractious country in the Middle East. The legacy is a cultural climate that stultifies our politics and corrupts our discourse.
Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.
...
But if you sense, as I do, that greater danger lies ahead, and that our divisions and recent history have combined to make the American polity and constitutional order increasingly vulnerable, then the calculus of risk changes. Sometimes, when the world is changing rapidly, the greater risk is caution. Close-up in this election campaign, Obama is unlikely. From a distance, he is necessary. At a time when America’s estrangement from the world risks tipping into dangerous imbalance, when a country at war with lethal enemies is also increasingly at war with itself, when humankind’s spiritual yearnings veer between an excess of certainty and an inability to believe anything at all, and when sectarian and racial divides seem as intractable as ever, a man who is a bridge between these worlds may be indispensable.
We may in fact have finally found that bridge to the 21st century that Bill Clinton told us about. Its name is Obama.

Sully has done a complete 180deg. turn in the past couple of years or so, and if he can see the logic in an Obama candidacy, and why it is vitally important to reject the McBush/McClinton ticket, surely millions of others less-disposed to Sully's rightist perspective are reaching the same conclusions, and for the right reasons.

[barrisj]

Ah, bugger, forgot the link:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama

[The Oracle]

The most criminal administration in American history is using every trick in the book (i.e. the fascist playbook) to avoid accountability and being prosecuted for their crimes against our nation and against humanity.

1) The Bush criminals get their Republican hack lawyers in the Justice Department (initially under Ashcroft, then Gonzales and now Mukasey) to issue "rulings" in support of their illegalities.

2) The Bush criminals get their Republican fascist pals in Congress to ram through legislation giving retroactive immunity for any crimes the Bush criminals have committed, easily accomplished when rubber-stamp Republicans controlled Congress, but a little more difficult now that Democrats are in charge.

3) And as a last resort, the Bush criminals expect George W. Bush to use his pardon power (as he did in the criminal case of Scooter Libby) to give all the Bush criminals a free pass, placing them all, or so they hope, beyond the reach of any court or the law. Thus, I predict that Bush, just as he's leaving office, will issue a record number of pardons, equivalent to the number of highly illegal, unconstitutional signing statements he and his fellow criminals have used to circumvent the law since he entered office.

I bet members of the Mafia wish they had as great a friend as George W. Bush to pardon them or get them retroactive immunity.