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ProSense

(116,464 posts)
Thu Apr 25, 2013, 11:06 AM Apr 2013

Pressure Mounts On Obama To Investigate Torture

Reposting.

National Security Brief: Pressure Mounts On Obama To Investigate Torture

By ThinkProgress

Pressure is mounting on the Obama administration to allow access to documents pertaining to the CIA’s post 9/11 terror suspect detention program and to order a full accounting of the Bush-era torture program. At the outset of his first term, President Obama said his administration would not be investigating torture because, he said, he wanted to “look forward, not backward.”

A bipartisan 11-member task force convened by the Constitution Project released a report on Tuesday concluding that the Bush administration’s interrogation polices after 9/11 were, in fact, torture, but it also criticized the Obama White House for blocking a formal investigation into the matter. “As long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United States could again engage in torture,” their report says.

“The Obama administration also has failed to be as open and accountable on such fundamental questions of law, morality and principle as a great power that widely supports human rights needs to be,” Task Force member Thomas Pickering wrote in the Washington Post on Tuesday.

An editorial in the New York Times on Wednesday piled on. “The report’s appearance all these years later is a reminder of the lost opportunity for a full accounting in 2009 when President Obama chose not to support a national commission to investigate the post-9/11 detention and interrogation programs,” the Times writes, adding, “(I)dentifying past mistakes so they can be avoided is central to looking forward.”

- more -

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/04/17/1878711/national-security-brief-pressure-obama-torture/


Editorial

Indisputable Torture

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

A dozen years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, an independent, nonpartisan panel’s examination of the interrogation and detention programs carried out in their aftermath by the Bush administration may seem to be musty old business. But the sweeping report issued on Tuesday by an 11-member task force convened by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, provides a valuable, even necessary reckoning.

The work of the task force, led by two former congressmen — Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, who served in the Bush administration as under secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and James Jones, a Democrat, who was an ambassador to Mexico during the Clinton years — is informed by interviews with dozens of former American and foreign officials, as well as with former prisoners.

It is the fullest independent effort so far to assess the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. Those who sanctioned the use of brutal methods, like former Vice President Dick Cheney, will continue to defend their use. But the report’s authoritative conclusion that “the United States engaged in the practice of torture” is impossible to dismiss by a public that needs to know what was committed in the nation’s name...The task force found that using torture — like waterboarding, slamming prisoners into walls, and chaining them in uncomfortable stress position for hours — had “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” And in engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions, the United States violated its international treaty obligations. A detailed 22-page appendix cites dozens of legal cases in which the United States prosecuted similar treatment or denounced it as torture when carried out by other countries.

<...>

The report’s appearance all these years later is a reminder of the lost opportunity for a full accounting in 2009 when President Obama chose not to support a national commission to investigate the post-9/11 detention and interrogation programs. At that time, Mr. Obama said he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” But identifying past mistakes so they can be avoided is central to looking forward. The Constitution Project’s effort is a good step in that direction. But the portrait of what happened is still incomplete. For starters, a separate 6,000-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, based on Central Intelligence Agency records, has yet to be declassified and made public. The next step should be its release. There is no excuse for further delay.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/opinion/indisputable-torture-of-prisoners.html?_r=0


Fuck Bush!

4 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Pressure Mounts On Obama To Investigate Torture (Original Post) ProSense Apr 2013 OP
Yessssssss Berlum Apr 2013 #1
Three words: "Obstruction of Justice" Coyotl Apr 2013 #2
HA.GOOD LUCK WITH THAT montanacowboy Apr 2013 #3
K&R damn the torturemongers n/t johnnyreb Apr 2013 #4
 

Coyotl

(15,262 posts)
2. Three words: "Obstruction of Justice"
Thu Apr 25, 2013, 11:32 AM
Apr 2013

Obstruction of Justice is often the crime that brings down politicians. Obama would be well advised to not continue down that road, or he will be in court himself along with Bush.

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