WH Press Secy: There Will Be No Accountability For Torture

By Steve Hynd

Can we forget the idea that Obama is trying to manuever the people into "forcing" him to investigate and prosecute Bush era torturers? Think Progress:

CNN’S ED HENRY: Just so I understand, you’re saying the people in the CIA who followed through on what they were told was legal, they should not be prosecuted? But why not the Bush administration lawyers who, in the eyes of a lot of your supporters on the left, twisted the law, why are they not being held accountable?

GIBBS: The president is focused on looking forward. That’s why.

There is no sense in which this is fanning the fires to build a popular consensus which might be used to overturn The Establishment's hostility to prosecutions. Instead, it is sheer complicity with law-breaking.

Norman Geras:

Obama cites in defence of his decision a reason that has been discredited legally - namely that 'those who carried out their duties rel[ied] in good faith upon [the] legal advice' that was given to them, a version, surely, of acting on higher authority. But there is no higher authority that can legitimize the practice of torture. This is a crime under international law, as is all but universally recognized, and everyone may be expected to know that it is, irrespective of how they have been advised. Apart from the legal constraint, all people, everywhere, have a moral duty not to torture.

As regrettable as Obama's fudging of this issue - his failure, that is, to state forthrightly what is being sacrificed to the political goal of avoiding disunity - are the large numbers of liberal commentators who simply endorse what he did, as if it were to them the most routine matter.

...Not to prosecute torture flies in the face of both international law and ordinary morality. But here it's like water off a duck's back - as if the politics were everything and law and morality of no account.

That's the bottom line.

Comments

[geoff]

I'm afraid you are right. Disappointing but not really unexpected, I think. However, did Obama in his Thursday statement actually have to praise the torturers:
"... it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties [the torturing?] relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution. The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world. Their accomplishments are unsung and their names unknown, but because of their sacrifices, every single American is safer.

He is certainly establishing some charming precedents: immunity and praise. When do the medals get awarded or have they been already.

[Jim Henley]

Except Robert Gibbs is clearly John Hodgman, so we have to assume this is satire.