Rahm Emanuel confirms no prosecutions for torture, period.

By Steve Hynd

I wish I could say I was surprised by Emmanuel's conversation with George Stephanopoulos:

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said during our exclusive interview Sunday on "This Week"  that President Barack Obama will not pursue the prosecution of Bush-era officials who devised torture policy against detainees, as laid out in memos the Obama administration released this week.

...I asked Emanuel: "The president has ruled out prosecution for CIA officials who believed they were following the law. Does he believe that the officials who devised the policies should be immune from prosecution?"

"He believes that, look, as you saw in that statement he wrote, let's just take a step back. He came up with this and worked on this for about four weeks. Wrote that statement Wednesday night after he had made his decision and dictated what he wanted to see. And Thursday morning I saw him in the office, he was still editing it. He believes that people in good faith were operating with the guidance they were provided," Emanuel said.

What about those who devised the policy, I asked?

"Yeah, but those who devised the policy, he believes that they were, should not be prosecuted either," Emanuel said.

"And it's not the place that we go, and as he said in that letter, and I would really recommend people  look at the full statement, not the letter, the statement, and that second paragraph: "This is not a time for retribution. It's a time for reflection. It's not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back and in a sense of anger and retribution.' We have a lot to do to protect America. But what people need to know? This practice and technique, we don't use anymore. We banned it."

Straight from the White House Chief of Staff's mouth. America allows its leaders to get away with torture because, well, they're the elite. It doesn't matter that a majority of Democrats, independents and the country as a whole want investigations - they just don't care.

Right now, I almost feel like the U.S. could do with a bit of "red flag flying here", power-for-the-people outrage of the Bastille storming kind to shake that elite out of its complacency and arrogant belief that they're better than us, should have different laws from us. Trouble is, you only end up swapping one elite for another that way. Real revolutionary change is gradual, not the "hope from above" which Obama played on to win and which the wingnut conspiracy believers think is a prelude to a socialist takeover. Naomi Klein at HuffPo a couple of days ago:

Hope was a fine slogan when rooting for a long-shot presidential candidate. But as a posture toward the president of the most powerful nation on earth, it is dangerously deferential. The task as we move forward (as Obama likes to say) is not to abandon hope but to find more appropriate homes for it -- in the factories, neighborhoods and schools where tactics like sit-ins, squats and occupations are seeing a resurgence.

Political scientist Sam Gindin wrote recently that the labor movement can do more than protect the status quo. It can demand, for instance, that shuttered auto plants be converted into green-future factories, capable of producing mass-transit vehicles and technology for a renewable energy system. "Being realistic means taking hope out of speeches," he wrote, "and putting it in the hands of workers."

Which brings me to the final entry in the lexicon.

Hoperoots. Sample sentence: "It's time to stop waiting for hope to be handed down, and start pushing it up, from the hoperoots."

The underlying problem was illustrated in a neat graphic back when the Dems (including Obama) folded on FISA.

 

Don't get mad, get even.

Solidarinosc.

Comments

[Ron Beasley]

Clinton all over again except Obama has a big majority in both the House and Senate. Clinton ran as a progressive but shortly before the inauguration Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan sat him down and and told him how Washington really worked and we ended up with Reagan Lite for eight years. I would be willing to bet that Larry Summers and Robert Rubin had that same talk with Obama. The Parties may change but the power brokers stay the same.

[new fan]

I have never visited this site until I saw the much missed Cernig in the comments section on Crooks. You are my favorite blogger that has ever written for C&L. As such, I plan to visit Newshoggers frequently. I haven't liked the direction C&L has been headed for awhile now because it seems to be drifting into a partisan trap. I still love the site, of course, but this is a real breath of fresh air.

Thanks for your hard work. Time to spread the word about your blog. It really deserves a much larger audience. It's a real treasure.

[fiver]

I'm with new fan. I didn't know that you had left C&L, Cernig. You are missed. In any case, I'm glad you're still in the intertubes and will be watching Newshoggers much more closely.

Keep up the great work.

[Steve Hynd]

Thanks folks.

When I joined C&L I promised my Newshoggers partners they would always get the best of me, and after a while that just wasn't happening - I was getting too tied up in internal scheduling and editing decisions at C&L (posts by minor authors like myself get scheduled up to 48 hours in advance there, which explains why sometimes I appeared to be far behind the news curve). So, after a couple of mild differences of opinion with John Amato on pieces critical of Obama I decided I'd be better thanking the folks there and quietly exiting rather than hang around for what could eventually be a messy bust-up. I suspect John is coming around to my way of thinking nowadays, but I'm still happy I decided to keep my commitment to my partners here.

Regards, Steve