printEver wonder why the Democrats and their media lapdogs never shut-up about the issue of torture, when Bush’s decision to wage an unjust, illegal war ought to be the focus of their Ire? The matter of torture is, after all, subsumed within the broader category of an unjust war. Moreover, one can make the case for torture in desperate, dire situations. (I’m not making the case, I’m saying that one can attempt to justify incidents of torture: you were not thinking clearly, you were desperate to avert another disaster, you wanted to save hostages; you worried you’d be blamed if you didn’t extract crucial information.) But how on earth do you justify lugging an army across the ocean to occupy a third-world country that is no danger to you and has not threatened you? You don’t, you can’t.
Democrats are nearly as culpable as Republicans on the matter of the war on Iraq. So they stick with their limited, safe mandate of torture. MSNBC’s Maddow and Olbermann, and their constitutional scholar, are thus careful to skirt the need to prosecute Bush and his bandits for invading Iraq. Instead, they stick to waterboarding.
CNN confirms that “Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy has called for a commission on torture allegations”:
The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman called Wednesday for the establishment of a nonpartisan “commission of inquiry” to investigate allegations of wrongdoing against former Bush administration officials in their prosecution of the war on terrorism.
Nothing “did more to damage America’s place in the world than the revelation that our great nation stretched the law and the bounds of executive power to authorize torture and cruel treatment,” Sen. Patrick Leahy said at the start of a committee hearing.
American “detention policies and practices from Guantanamo Bay [Cuba] and Abu Ghraib [Iraq] have seriously eroded fundamental American principles of the rule of law,” he added.
Leahy, D-Vermont, called for the “truth commission” to have a “targeted mandate” focusing on issues of national security and executive power. He said it should look specifically at allegations of “questionable interrogation techniques,” “extraordinary rendition” and the “executive override of laws.”
He added that the commission should have the power to issue subpoenas and offer immunity to witnesses “in order to get to the whole truth.”
Leahy refused to rule out of the possibility of prosecutions for perjury committed during the commission’s hearings.
Much of the Democratic party approved of and continues to approve of the “War” (never declared and against a government that no longer exists) in Iraq and funds it so it cannot really complain on those grounds. Even worse, Obama and his fellow Demoplicans are expanding the “War” (non-declared) in Afghan-Pak-istan although the aims, strategy, criteria for termination, and raison d’être seem utterly mysterious. Because the Taliban is mean to women.. – then every woman in that region should own and use an AK-47 – but that is NOT an American problem. Or should Americans die for Hamid Karzai, the Ngo Dinh Diem Distinguished Professor of American Imperialist Puppetude of the University of Kabul?? By the way, Glenn Greenwald of Salon magazine has excellent articles following the general wussiness and hypocrisy of the Obamaphiles in renouncing the excesses of Bush-Cheney-Gonzales’ shredding of due process and the rule of law. However, I prefer that this country just “go and sin no more” than to “prosecute” Cheney and his lackeys {we’ll never get closure and if the US gets “attacked”, these lackeys will seem like “martyrs”}. Sadly, adopting a non-aggressive foreign policy is too big a step for the Democrats.
With all the illogic on both sides of the cesspool, the argument is akin to a spitball fight in a kindergarten class.
No, we shouldn’t torture. And no, we shouldn’t kill people either, unless we’re at (real) war. And war doesn’t mean perpetual occupation with hidden motives, either.
“Justice” certainly means something different to us than it does to anyone in either party (except you-know-who).