OBAMA'S TORTURED LOGIC

I’m not going to dwell on the specifics. There’s sufficient information in the mainstream media that presents a compelling against the Bush lied when he said America doesn’t torture. Turns out with President Obama’s recent release of the twisted legal justifications by the Bush Administration we did in fact torture people and as such we violate international and our own federal law begging the questions who is accountable and more importantly who will hold them accountable.

Suffice it to say that the actions of the Bush Administration have violated the Convention Against Torture signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1998 and ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1994, the Geneva Convention Article 146, the Charter of the International Tribunal at Nuremberg Article 8 and the U.S. Constitution Article VI.

Inexplicably President Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, have already stated they will not hold the CIA operatives who conducted the torture accountable but said nothing about those who wrote the directives permitting torture or those at the very top who authorized the war crimes that were committed in our name.

The only explanation President Obama has provided is that he prefers to look forward rather than backward. How odd that an individual educated in Constitutional Law from Harvard no less would choose to ignore history let alone the Constitution which he swore not only once but twice to uphold.

Former President Richard Nixon was never charged with violating federal law when officials from his election campaign held secret discussions with the South Vietnamese to insure them they’d get a better deal if Nixon was elected. The South Vietnamese were a no show at the peace talks and over 20,000 more Americans and millions of Vietnamese would die before we declared “peace with honor. Richard Nixon was never charged with that crime and five years later he would be pardoned for the high crimes and misdemeanors he committed even though he was never he found guilty.

Not holding Richard Nixon accountable for the crimes he committed permitted the Reagan election campaign to commit the same crimes against federal law when they visited with Iranian officials to make a deal of weapons for hostages. Instead of holding Reagan accountable he was elected not only once but twice and his trickle down economics ultimately led to the economic crisis we now face not to mention the military aid he provided to Iraq and the supported he gave to what would eventually become the group responsible for 9/11.

By failing to hold Reagan accountable his Vice-President, George H. W. Bush who was involved in those talks with Iranian officials was elected to oversee the Savings and Loan scandal as well as invade Iraq, kill over 500,000 Iraqis mostly women and children in the process and provide al-Qaeda one of the major reasons to hate us and act out by leveling the world trade towers.

Since George H. W. Bush wasn’t held accountable we got to find out what is meant by the sins of the father are visited upon the son when George W. Bush was selected to be President by five members of the supreme court who proved justice wasn’t blind it was in fact highly partisan. The son would be elected a second time by getting out the vote from Christians conservatives who felt threatened by the possibility of gay marriage.

The result of George W Bush was an unjust war waged against the sovereign nation of Iraq based on deceit and deception of the American public and a continuation of Reaganomics that eventually brought the global economy to a state of collapse. Is it possible the economic conditions we face today could have been avoided if a democratically controlled Congress in 2006 pushed for impeachment of George W Bush and Dick Cheney rather than taking that option off the table as soon as they were elected?

Now President Obama has an opportunity to be the candidate of change that he claimed to be by holding George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and other high level officials of his administration accountable by establishing a special prosecutor to investigate whether or not war crimes were committed by the Bush Administration and if they were to recommend holding them accountable to the fullest extent of the law.

Looking forward and ignoring the past is more of the same and almost insures that someone far worse than George W Bush will be elected who will perhaps usher in the end of this once great republic. If President Obama’s Administration pursues bringing a 16 year old Somali pirate to justice for surrendering to the Navy and providing them with vital information which aided their success in killing the other pirates and saving the ship’s captain while looking the other way and failing to bring George W Bush to justice for war crimes that’s not change we can believe in that’s only more of the same hypocrisy we can longer afford.

In the final analysis it seems President Obama’s logic is more a case of reductum ad absurdum because the logic of looking forward would compel every criminal to claim in his or her defense that we should forget the past and result in a world where nothing is forbidden and everything is permitted.