Somebody help me here with what should be done as we revisit the horrors brought to light in the release of the Senate torture report. People were hired to force things up people's rectums in order to keep us safe. I don't want to be safe that bad.
I want justice, as do my friends around the world. Sad thing is many of my friends are from countries that have also allowed torture after 9-11. We all must band together for accountability. What to do?
Here in this country seems The Democratic Party leadership decided not to prosecute Bushco torture because some, like Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry, probably signed off on it and therefore were complicit.
But what about incoming President Obama? Because of the complicity of those Dem leaders did he decide that the Party must be protected above considerations of human rights and common decency? He did immediately come into office and approved extrajudicial killings in the ME, eventually even including several US citizens.
So now with the release of the Senate CIA torture report intro, when Germans and Belgian and British friends of mine are rightly calling for justice, what can be said? That it's complicated? That here in the US we have overriding political considerations that trump this?
One professor says no, that we are obligated to prosecute.
Other international law experts and rights advocates who have long supported an accounting for the C.I.A.'s behavior concurred with that assessment.
Jordan J. Paust, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, said the report “adds another layer of proof of serial international criminality that was manifestly authorized” during President George W. Bush’s two terms in office.
In a commentary on Jurist.org, Professor Paust said both the Convention Against Torture and the 1949 Geneva Conventions require the United States to prosecute or extradite any person “reasonably accused of having criminal responsibility” for the documented instances of torture.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Another says that Mr. Obama is trying to avoid endless legal troubles after leaving office
Why Obama Won’t Prosecute Torturers
They clearly violated the law.
By Eric Posner
Obama’s problem is that if he can prosecute Republican officeholders for authorizing torture, then the next Republican president can prosecute Obama and his subordinates for the many questionable legal actions of the Obama administration—say, the drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki and three other American citizens. Sen. Ted Cruz cites the drone strike as one of 76 alleged illegal actions by the Obama administration. You don’t have to believe every one of Cruz’s charges to see that Obama and his subordinates could spend years under investigation after he leaves office if a Republican president thought such a course of action politically expedient. Although a jury would be just as unlikely to convict Obama officials as it would be to convict Bush officials, the problem is that the investigations themselves are extraordinarily burdensome. The prospect of criminalization of political behavior raises the stakes for elections because if you or your boss loses an election, you not only lose the trappings of office but gain the prospect of being investigated for the rest of your life. This will encourage officeholders to take ever more extreme actions to stay in office.
That is the lesson of unstable democracies—Turkey, right now, is the best example, where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used criminal investigations to harass his opponents. But we have our own experience of this in the United States. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Congress passed a statute that authorized an independent counsel—uncontrolled by the president—to investigate wrongdoing in the executive branch. A series of independent counsels wreaked extraordinary havoc investigating the Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan administration and the Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky, and related scandals in the Clinton White House. While there is little doubt that in some cases high-level executive officials broke the law, Congress allowed the independent counsel statute to lapse because the disruption caused by these investigations was worse than the behavior that was investigated.
The upshot is that, hidden in our unwritten constitution is a norm that Congress cannot criminalize certain behavior that the president authorizes on national-security grounds. This is just how our system works, driven by an implicit deal between the parties to keep political warfare within boundaries.
Prosecute We Must
No. We must not leave it at that. We are better than that.
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