In a nation of laws George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, Alberto Gonzalez, Colin Powell, John Yoo and hordes of others (including Henry Kissinger IMHO) would be in prison right now. Instead we have George Bush touring the nation giving ‘motivational’ speeches, Dick Cheney all over national television week after week advising and criticizing the Obama administration while justifying his own shameful malfeasance, John Yoo posing as a distinguished professor of law at UC Berkley, and Henry Kissinger pontificating about Afghanistan in a stunningly hypocritical article published in a prominent national magazine as if he and all his war criminal brethren were not a total national disgrace.
How do these people show their faces in public? How do they sleep at night? What is wrong with us that we have not raised sufficient hell to bring justice to our nation and to the world? How is it that we fail to recognize our own culpability in their crimes? Why can we not seem to bring ourselves to do the right thing - to try, convict and imprison these monstrous criminals?
I think it has to do with the fact that the cancer Eisenhower warned us about in 1961, the Military Industrial Complex, has metastasized and that the patient, our beloved nation, is now terminal. I fear that even Barack Obama, with a boatload of the best intentions, may not be able to save us now. I believe, for example, that he wanted to stop torture when he took office, but that he has been unable to do so...not entirely at any rate.
Anniversaries can be important. This Friday marks the 22nd anniversary of the U.N. Convention against Torture, ratified and signed under President Reagan. Last Friday marked the 150th day of the presidency of Barack Obama, who is trying to put a definitive end to the torture approved by the Bush-Cheney administration.
That Obama has not been able to do so is our collective shame. Worse still, the president has apparently concluded that he lacks the support to deter future abominations of this sort by launching a proper investigation and holding to account those responsible.
Something evil has seeped into the soul of our nation. Those many years when we looked the other way, choosing to ignore the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, eroded our morality.
Torture Has Not Ended Under Obama; What Are We Going to Do About It?
I like President Obama and am loath to blame him for our continued failure to be accountable as he is fighting against profoundly entrenched powers, but he is the one we have to hold responsible, he is the one from whom we have to demand justice. To excuse any of those things we condemned under Bush because our guy is now in charge would be the rankest sort of hypocrisy.
We must demand better of Obama. Specifically, we must demand prosecutions of key figures in the Bush administration for lying us into war and implementing a program of torture. Aggressive war and torture are the most serious war crimes there are – and there can be no question that these crimes were committed. They are in fact well documented, and there is no rationale for ignoring the facts. To allow these precedents to stand is to admit that we are done for as a nation, that we are no longer a moral agent in the world, no longer a nation of laws and no longer a world leader in any sense of the word. To look away and pretend that nothing happened here is lower ourselves to the level of every other bloodthirsty thug who ever ignored the principles of human decency, to wallow in the mud of history, to embrace lawlessness, to proclaim to one and all that in fact might does make right and that no evil is too evil for the United States of America.
I so want to believe we are better than this.
It is my personal view that we have a moral obligation to history, to ourselves and to the world at large to honor justice and human decency by bringing our war criminals to justice before the world. If we don’t, it means that there is no justice in this world and that we, the people of the United States of America...have no honor.
Bring out our war criminals President Obama – or condemn every American to live perpetually under the shame they have brought upon us all.
Update: Thanks to Unenergy for this excellent video: