… I mean, they have to cover the Economy, the Obama transition, the *shocking* revelation that the Illinois Governor tried to use politics for personal gain….
That doesn’t really leave any time to talk about the fact that a bipartisan Senate committee released a report (PDF of executive summary) confirming that infamous acts of torture carried out by US personnel at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo were planned, ordered and orchestrated by President George W. Bush, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice….or the fact that the Vice President flat-out admitted to war crimes in an interview with ABC.
Folks — we prosecuted and executed Japanese soldiers for doing these exact techniques. They are war crimes — flat out. The law has not been changed — the administration has just continually maintained that they somehow “aren’t torture.”
Not only are we not going to prosecute (which I *almost* understand — Obama’s got his hands full with trying to get the country back on track economically, among other things, and if he went into prosecutorial mode, the entire administration would be bogged down in a long, painful fight, which the Republicans would screech about being “partisan” and nothing else would get done. I get that. I really do.), but we’re not even talking about it much. The media wants to concentrate on other things.
I can get that people are almost treating the past 8 years as something that they just want to forget and put behind us. But I’m afraid that if the shocking level of lawlessness displayed by our own government isn’t fundamentally addressed in some way (if not prosecution, then at least a South African-styled set of “Truth & Reconciliation” hearings, where everything is put out in the open and we avow not to let anything like it happen again), it’s only a matter of time before another group of criminals gets into power and does the same things, or worse. All because we never said NO. Not my country. Not in my name. Never again.