rethinking the tax cuts, the use of torture, the Labor Law of free ballots,(Employee Free Choice), universal health care—and the excuse wil be the cost of a double bailout that the Dems helped vote through…

Holder has come out for that section of the Patriot act that allows American secret police to examine the books and papers Americans buy and read in the library.  without telling them.  Even if not susupected of Terrorism.

Just like the Bushites.

The primary indictment at Nurember was “waging a war of aggression.”  I believe Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Armitage, Feith, Powell, Rice, and many others could be charged with that crime.

I believe they should hang, at Nuremberg, alongside the ghosts of their Nazi brethren.

It has never happened in the history of the US that the executive branch has voluntarily ceded any power back to congress or the states once it has claimed it.  It has been forced to do so by the courts and by congress but it has never done so voluntarily.  I can’t imagine Obama saying to congress or the courts, “I seem to have too much power here; please take some of it away from me.”  There was a discussion on npr recently as to whether Obama would continue Bush’s practice of attatching signing statements to laws passed by congress declaring that he would not honor them.  The general consensus was that Obama would continue the practice which is probably unconstitutional.

In an article about Holder and torture Scott Shane writes in the New York Times “Two obstacles stand in the way of a prosecution: legal opinions from the Justice Department that declared even the harshest interrogation methods to be legal, and a provision in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that grants strong legal protections to government employees who relied on such advice in counter-terrorism programs”.
Apparently Mr. Shane is unaware of the so-called Nuremberg-defense. At the Nuremberg trials German defendants claimed that they had been ordered to commit war crimes such as murdering captured and disarmed Soviet military political commissars because Hitler had approved it. The judges did not accept the Nuremberg-defense.

I’ll believe it when it stops…when public apologies to the world at large have been made…when our laws are restructured so that it will never happen again.

Until then, i hear nothing but words from politicians and they don’t count for much.  Our new president come out of nowhere; he was a Senator until recently and i don’t remember any fine oratory from the Senate floor about how incredibly un-American torture is or about how our indulgence of institutionalized torture destroys the very things that this nation is supposed to stand for.

And Holder is an unapologetic drug-warrior so we already know that he cares not one whit for innocence or has any clear sense of right and wrong.

One set of rats leaves the ships to another is how this is shaping up.

Tony Wicker—troublesum reports that Obama is changing his mind about waterboarding as Dem leaders like Feinstein have become more Flexable about allowing torture.  Which Holder has evaded.  More Change We Can Believe In.

But we can count on you, Tony.  You will apoligise for Obama no matter what he does.  He’s So Smart!

Obama, too, seems to believe that high government muckety-mucks can murder, torture, and imprison with impunity.

If Bush hangs for murder or war crimes, and his henchmen hang, too, I’ll think this may be a country with the rule of law.

If not, I’m seriously considering a life of crime.

Holder is going to have a problem with his boss because NPR was reporting yesterday that Obama is “rethinking” his position on torture techniques such as waterboarding.  He now believes that they can lawfully be used under “certain circumstances.”  Change we can believe in never ends.

By dihey, January 16 at 1:28 pm

I quite agree with Johnathan Turley, whom I admire,  although I would say to you that it is too early to tell whether Obama is a coward and Holder a sissy, or whether they are just being cautious about the way they talk. As I keep reminding people, the Obama administration is not even in power yet. “Disturbed” is not as good as, say, “outraged”, but we could get to outrage pretty soon.

By ProUnionProLabor, January 16 at 2:13 pm #

So the trials start on Jan.21, 2009….Right?

  =x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x

Pro,

Well, it will take a while to get the indictments, with a process of working one’s way up the chain of command until we get to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, but yes, if Holder or Obama are worth a damn it will happen. Obama is avoiding making statements at this time, preferring to keep quiet and leave it to the AG to perform a non-political investigation. But Holder has said that waterboarding “is” torture, and Cheney already confessed to ordering it on national TV. The day I see Cheney behind bars I will believe our Constitution has been restored, not before.

The law is VERY CLEAR on this. The Senators on the Intelligence Oversight Committee that were in charge of oversight and failed are JUST AS COMPLICIT in the torture…

UNLESS YOU HAVE THE STOMACH TO INCLUDE THEM among the guilty, you will not be able to prosecute Bush, because they stand ready to intervene for him, albeit to save themselves. If you are not ready to prosecute THESE MEMBERS then you should just give it up and COMPLETELY STOP WHINING, because you will get nowhere. (If I were one of these members, I would be getting an attorney TODAY to figure out how to get out of the net the Bush administration has caught them in and explain why they should not be charged as well.)

The members are (were):
Democrats: John D. Rockefeller IV,West Virginia Chairman; Dianne Feinstein, California; Ron Wyden, Oregon; Evan Bayh, Indiana; Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland; Russell D. Feingold, Wisconsin; Bill Nelson, Florida; Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island;
Republicans: Christopher S. Bond, Missouri Vice Chairman; John Warner, Virginia; Chuck Hagel, Nebraska; Saxby Chambliss, Georgia; Orrin Hatch, Utah; Olympia J. Snowe, Maine; Richard;  Burr, North Carolina; Harry Reid, Nevada, Ex Officio; Mitch McConnell, Kentucky, Ex Officio; Carl Levin, Michigan, Ex Officio; John McCain, Arizona, Ex Officio

“The recent disclosure of the fact that the CIA briefed a bi-partisan group of Senators and Representatives on the Congressional Intelligence Committees about methods of torture used by the CIA, including “water boarding”, is evidence that there is complicity in these crimes by members of Congress.”

…Importantly, Article One of the Convention’s definition of torture includes not only acts committed by Public Officials but also the acts to which they acquiesced.”
“…prior to the activity constituting torture, have awareness of such activity and thereafter breach his or her legal responsibility to intervene to prevent such activity”
…The members of Congress who were advised by the CIA that torturing prisoners, including water boarding, was being used included Rockefeller, from the family that is reaping an added fortune in billions of dollars from their oil, gas, and finance international conglomerates during the invasion and occupation of Iraq; Pelosi that voted for and continues to vote to fund the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Palestine beyond the internationally recognized 1948 and 1967 border between Palestine and Israel;
…The Senators who were advised of the CIA’s use of torture became complicit in the act of torture upon their failure to intervene in the continuing practice and, even worse, in their encouragement of the CIA’s use of torture.”

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-bin/blo…_use_of_torture

So the trials start on Jan.21, 2009….Right?

To the best of my knowledge it was Jonathan Turley who noticed on MSNBC last night that Holder had not been asked whether he was going to appoint a special investigator to investigate and, if justified, prosecute American torturers. In my opinion he does not have to be asked because he has to “uphold our laws”. If Holder does not appoint a special prosecutor, say, within a few weeks after having been sworn in President Obama must replace him with an Attorney General with balls. If President Obama does nothing he must be impeached.

Jonathan Turley hit bullseye when he asked “if a member of an administration has committed a murder should he not be investigated and brought to trial”?

Holder commented: “the president-elect and I are both disturbed by what we have seen and what we have heard”. Disturbed? That is rich. On Tuesday our nation will witness the inauguration of a coward-in-chief an a few days later of his sissy AG.

Is the break-in demanded and condoned by President Nixon a greater crime than torture demanded and condoned by Vice President Cheney and President Bush? Remember that Nixon would probably have been convicted if President Ford had not given him a blanket pardon.

Both progressive and conservative mainstream media feature Holder, the new Atorney-General stating that waterboarding is torture.  What a courageous and insightful statement!  The kind we can expect from Obama.  What they do no report is tha Holder was equivical on other forms of torture, was in favor of Indefinate Preemptive Detention-imprisoning someone for life on the supposition that they were going to do something- and spying on the American people.

Presumably his continued oppression of the American people will be mitigated by stopping attacks on Dem leaders.  Presumably Obama, or his operatives, selected an African-American to signal that he is not going to increase targeting the A-A community in the way Gops do.  Just the rest of us.  A new Hope n Change pplice state.

This piece indicates why it is necessary to de-Educated and de-Inform the population. The media routinely sanitizes right wing poliicies and power figures by what is emphasized and what is excluded from the discussion.  Obama’s personal charm is being used to construct a neoliberal police state, and the time to oppose it is now.