I sent the following letter to Barack Obama today. I urge you all to write as well. If you don't want to write your own letter, and agree with what I wrote, copy my letter and endorse it as expressing your views. But, don't do nothing. These are perilous times.
April 20, 2009
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Obama:
When a government chooses to ignore some laws and not others, as the Bush administration did, it sends a message to the world that it is morally corrupt and not to be trusted or respected.
I avidly supported your election specifically to reverse the mismanagement and decline of our government into something that sordidly disgraced its founders’ memory and, accordingly, I am dismayed by your unfathomable decision to continue that moral bankruptcy by ignoring the ignominious justifications for torture crafted and practiced by the Bush administration.
Disrespect for the law by one’s government breeds more such disrespect in its constituents and a regrettable descent into chaos and corruption. Simply put, it is wrong!
As a Constitutional scholar you cannot possibly believe there is any credible debate that torture is, and has been, anything but illegal and barbaric. At Nuremburg, and in post-WWII Japan, we tried practitioners of torture as war criminals—imprisoning and even executing them—yet you now simply want to declare torture as wrong while allowing its American facilitators and perpetrators to wander free and unnamed among us as if their horrendous misdeeds do not even rise to the level of a misdemeanor. That is unconscionable hypocrisy. Laws in this country do not change by fiat.
I urge you to reconsider the stand you have taken on prosecuting those who have practiced heinous deeds in the name of this country’s citizens—In my name! In your name!—and demonstrate to them, and all others, that the United States of America is truly a nation of laws, not men. To do otherwise cannot possibly redeem this nation’s reputation and standing in the world, and will live forever in our history as the blackest of black marks on the essential meaning of democracy; a mark that will sadly declare to posterity the folly and failure of our forefathers’ ideals.
While I fear for our future, I also mourn our past, which I see slowly slipping into obscurity. You, Sir, as our leader, have a sacred duty to the memories of Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, to preserve in us the heartfelt belief that we are indeed the exemplar of democracy, not its counterfeit.
If we are to heal at all, we can only do so by owning our failures and finding the courage to lay a foundation for the future that declares a true respect for the dignity of human life. You must correct this wrong before it spreads among us like an insidious infection that can only do us all great harm.