There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. Victory goes to the falsifiers.

dahlia lithwick on obama's eschewing of any accountability for our nation's criminal behavior...

President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would “turn the page” on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush Administration’s war on terror. What he didn’t seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it’s feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it’s not illegal after all.

scott horton in harper's...

Since Barack Obama became president, the debate over torture in America has taken a morally corrupt turn. Defenders of the old regime continue to defend the use of torture as essential to the nation’s defense. Their claims are contradicted by the facts: torture was used to extract false confessions that fueled, among other things, the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. The fact that America tortured is still a principal recruiting tool for radical Islamists. But Obama has kept silent in the face of all of this, not wishing to engage torture apologists in debate. More significantly, he has apparently encouraged his Justice Department to squelch any meaningful investigation of torture, in violation of the clear requirements of law. A policy that says “don’t look back” means the triumph of torture: while we may not be captives of our past, we are the captives of our perception of the past. When one side offers an airbrushed version of the past and the other is silent, then, in the binary world of Washington, victory goes to the falsifiers.

i've been posting about accountability - more specifically, the lack thereof - since i started this blog in 2005 (see google's 97 hits here) and we're still not seeing any...

(above courtesy of information clearing house...)

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments

By George, I think she's GOT IT!

Dahlia: They're hiding something in the White House.
Higgins: I think she's got it. I think she's got it.
Eliza: They're hiding something in the White House.
Higgins: By George, she's got it. By George, she's got it.

(with apologies to Lerner and Loewe)

i must agree with dahlia lithwick... at this stage of the attorneygate game, chasing gonzo's lies is simply ignoring that the REAL problems are in the white house...

Alberto Gonzales is in his happy place. He enters the hearing room in the Rayburn Building for his testimony before the House judiciary committee smiling the smile of a man who sleeps well each night, in the warm glow of the president's love. Gone is the testy, defensive Gonzales who testified last month before the Senate. Today's attorney general breezes into the chamber with the certain knowledge that having bottomed out in April, he has nothing left to prove. His only role in this scandal is as decoy: He's the guy who runs out in front of the hunters and draws their fire so nobody pays any attention to what's happening at the White House.

and those REAL problems at the white house would be...?

The White House wanted party loyalists placed in either key battleground states, or in states where Republicans were being investigated or they thought Democrats should have been. Gonzales rolled out the welcome mat at the Justice Department and told them to install whomever they wanted while he played hearts on his computer. If Gonzales truly wants to rebut that narrative, he needs only to offer some plausible alternative. Anything at all. But he doesn't. He offers only distractions.

so, what's next...? the trail needs to be followed while it's still warm...

Submit To Propeller
Tweet

[Permalink] 0 comments