The president is wrong

not only wrong... seriously, totally, and fundamentally wrong...

dave lindorff and i are obviously thinking alike...

Now we have a president who is perhaps doing something worse. Admitting that the last administration of President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney ordered up a program of illegal and inhuman torture of captives in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and in the so-called War on Terror that was launched by them in the wake of the 9-11 attacks in 2001, and offering up documentary evidence of the chain of command that set the country on this criminal course, President Obama now says that to move beyond this “dark and painful chapter in our history,” he will not seek or permit any prosecution of those who committed torture of captives.

“Nothing will be gained,” Obama said, “by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.”

I’m not that concerned about whether individual torturers in the CIA or the military get prosecuted. If the president had said he would not prosecute people who “thought” they were acting under proper authority and behaving legally, but then added that he would pursue those who authorized and ordered them to torture, I would not have fussed. But that is not what he said. The implication of his statement, and the fact that he has not, this far into his term, ordered his Attorney General to appoint a prosecutor to investigate those who were responsible for the crime, given what he clearly knows about its authors, is the worst possible of travesties, and rises to the level of a war crime itself.

[...]

But the president is wrong. Darkness does not go away when the fog comes. It just gets darker.

i have nothing to add...

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