Barack the Faithless Refuses to Prosecute. Yet again, the Obama Administration has decided to actively co-conspire in the crimes of its predecessor. This time, it refuses to prosecute the people who destroyed videotapes of illegal interrogations/torture authorized by the Bush Administration.
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Voters could not punish Barack the Faithless directly on November 2nd. Instead, they struck out at innocent third parties, and ravaged this Republic in so doing. Barack Obama has no principles. He ran on principles, then got into office and immediately betrayed every principle he ran on.
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He said the U.S. should withdraw from Iraq, and end a war that Bush should not even have begun. Now he's been in office for nearly two years, and he is leaving 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq until the withdrawal date that BUSH set.
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Obama ran against the flagrant violations of human rights committed by the Bush Administration in endless crimes against the Geneva Convention and U.S. anti-torture laws. Now he is covering up those crimes, by consenting to destruction of the evidence!
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Obama has sold out his base, and betrayed everything his supporters thought they were voting for. Now, Obama has gotten exactly what he wanted: a Congress that will give him an excuse for selling out every remaining principle he has not already betrayed. And everyone who voted for "Change We Can Believe In" gets more of the same old crap.
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Thus will it always be as long as voters have only Tweedledum and Tweedledee — the Plutocracy Twins — to vote for. And voters have absolutely no idea of how to break the stranglehold the major parties have on their throat. They have bought the lie that only the two (present) major parties can ever win office, so they consent to have the two major parties block third parties from the ballot, and pretend that that is democracy. It is not.
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In any case, I read the surprisingly small number of reader comments after the story about the refusal of the "Department of Justice" — it is to laff! — refusing to prosecute people who destroyed evidence of CIA crimes, and added some comments of my own in reply. You should be able to infer the kind of thing I was answering, in the 26 comments I show below.
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CNS News is a conservative propaganda outfit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybercast_News_Service. Reputable news organizations have reported that waterboarding actually caused "KSM" [Khalid Sheikh Muhammed] to give FALSE information, and the useful information he LATER gave was produced by humane, legal methods of interrogation.
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"The law" did NOT find any such thing, because there was NO TRIAL. The Obama Administration has once again betrayed the Liberals who put it in office, and protected the war crimes of the prior Administration.
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Yes, Obama has betrayed his base -- which is why his base repudiated him or stayed home.
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In that we are not fiting any decalred war, our soldiers are not covered by the Geneva Convention, are they? They too are just terrorists, "irregular enemy combatants" as you call them. THINK. Your attitudes are sociopathic.
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If no law was violated, no tape would have been destroyed. Res ipse loquitur.
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Pardon me if I don't trust your statements as to the provisions of the Geneva Conventions. And if no "war" has been declared, how can a uniformed "soldier" be protected by the rules of "war"?
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If jsujet laffed his ass off, would there be anything left of him?
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Raical Rightists keep justifying tyranny, because they don't believe it can ever get THEM. I'd like to see Bush, Cheney, and the rest waterboarded to see if we can get to the truth of what they knew about WMD's before the Iraq invasion. I'd also like all Radical Rightists to get a taste of their own medicine. Everyone who makes excuses for waterboarding should be subjected to it, as punishment for their crimes.
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FALSE. U.S. law specifically banned waterboarding, after it was learned that the Japanese in WWII committed it.
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The fact that the tapes were destroyed PROVES that laws WERE violated.
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The trouble with your 'thinking' is that terrorists don't put that much value on their own lives, nor on truth. People willing to strap bombs to themselves and their brother are perfectly willing to lie.
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You can be sure that if Democrats had destroyed evidence of a Democrat's misbehavior, the Radical Right would be screaming for blood.
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Silliness. There is not a square inch of habitable land on this planet that wasn't "stolen" somewhere along the way. As for atomic bombs on Japan, Japan murdered 34 million Chinese, and millions of others as well. They got off easy. As for Dresden, that was only one of many atrocities on both sides of modern "total war", and I'd like to know how you would have tried to prevent the takeover of Southeast Asia by Communist militaries without bombs.
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If Obama had wanted to prosecute, there would be a prosecution. I was wondering how the Radical Right would find fault in Obama for doing something they wanted him to do. Now I see: you just pretend that he wanted to prosecute, when in fact it is obvious he did not. We on the Left are the ones who are properly indignant at Obama.
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Experts on interrogation and intelligence have said repeatedly that torture elicits LIES. Pay attention. Moreover, if the interrogations were lawful, the tapes would have been preserved, and the CIA would be bragging about how much useful information they elicited. Perhaps the main reason they were destroyed is that the information they developed turned out to be FALSE.
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Be consistent. Why don't we use waterboarding on the Mafia or street-gang members? If torture elicits truth, we could prevent lots of murders by torturing gangsters.
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The unreliability of compelled confessions is why we videotape police interrogations, instituted Miranda warnings, and outlawed the rubber hose in stationhouses.
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If Habanero69er really thinks the U.S. is in danger of shariah law being imposed on the United States, he should seek professional help.
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jimkimsan's thesis that "all's fair in love and war" conflicts with the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law. And if he thinks that people who are willing to strap bombs to their bodies, or even put a bomb in their UNDERWEAR are going to be dissuaded by waterboarding, he is as demented as evil.
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You know nothing about anything. Afghanistan has had DECADES of war. Do you really think that more war is the cure for decades of war? The Palestinians have been victims of military attack and invasion for 60 years, and both they and their allies are willing to fite another 60 or 100 or 300 years to get justice. The way to end wars is to do justice. When Britain and France inflicted an unjust peace on Germany after WWI, we got WWII. When the U.S. forbade a repeat of such insanely punitive provisions after WWII, we got peace.
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The United States has killed WAY over a MILLION Iraqis, who never attacked us, with the support of the bulk of Americans. Let us stop pretending to be innocents.
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jimkimsan's views are psychotic and sociopathic. He draws no distinction between prisoners of war and active combatants. He thinks he knows who -- not wearing a uniform -- is friend and who foe. Or is he just a teeshirt speaking: "Kill them all! Let God sort them out"? The United States attacked Iraq TWICE for no reason but to protect Israel, while pretending in the first war to be protecting Kuwait, which Senator Moynihan of NY called "a poisonous enemy" of the United States. But militarists never ask questions, and never think about right and wrong. Soldiers are supposed to take orders, no matter what they may be, and they pretend to deserve honor when they have none.
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Domenic is naive. The United States has made itself hated around the world with its massive violence against Arabs in particular and Moslems more generally. Past governments have supported tyrants all around the world and used "gunboat diplomacy" to serve the interests of the United Fruit Company in Central America and other corporations in countries on every continent. Europeans who live as well as we do, do NOT envy us in any regard, and there are scarcely any immigrants from Europe now, nor have there been for decades. Europeans are highlhy critical of our foolish and militarist foreign policy, as well they should be -- as well WE should be
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Only trivial numbers of American soldiers are being killed -- less in Afghanistan in nine years than during D-Day -- one day. Using 'saving U.S. lives' as an excuse for descending into barbarism does not work.
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Our troops' lives are NO more important than other troops' lives, or civilians' lives, in any country. Your stance is TRIBALIST, if not even racist.
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So I guess if it gets back to us that U.S. troops captured by foreign armies ARE waterboarded, the American Radical Right will be just fine with that.
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That "logic' excuses all war crimes and crimes against humanity -- and then comes right back on us, as our enemies use our inhuman acts to justify even more vicious acts against us. Round and round it goes, and everyone is brought low. As for killing people, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are pikers as against the United States. The Iraqi death toll in the CURRENT Iraq war is 1.4 million, and counting; 500,000 Iraqis, mostly children, were killed by sanctions in the decade after the first Iraq war; and an unknown, but large, number of Iraqis were killed by the United States in the first Iraq war. But you consider the U.S. innocents. There is another meaning of "innocent": clueless. Americans are that kind of "innocent".
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Yes, jsujet, people who invade a country that never attacked us and kill HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of innocents there are INDEED war criminals -- as are the people who make excuses for their crimes.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,427 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM