Obama claims that prosecuting those responsible for crafting those tortured logic (forgive the pun) legal opinions is looking backward instead of forward and we need to look forward. Incidentally, several Law professors have claimed that those memos would have received an F if submitted by first year law students, not because of moral content, but merely from the poor legal arguments - and one of the authors is a Federal Judge(!), but I digress.
If we take Obama's logic, then the next time I'm pulled over for speeding, I'll tell the cop, "Hey, let's look forward, not backward, ok?" Or the next killer on trial should plead with the court to look to the future, not the past. Please. The time for accountability is now. I really don't care whether it "works" or not, torture is illegal. We have a process in this country for making it legal if the case could be clearly made. I'd still be against it, yes even in the ticking time bomb scenario (and I might ask that if you spend a disproportionate time thinking about such a scenario that you flip the channel off 24 every once in a while). Being scared of the possibility of having a million people killed in a nuclear terrorist attack is not, in my opinion, a good reason to sacrifice all the core principles that many other millions of people have died protecting in the last 230+ years. There is something between being a doormat and becoming Nazi Germany. Perhaps we should find it.
And since we're on the topic of Germany, any idea what we should tell those Nazis we've been prosecuting under international law for the past 50+ years for torture and war crimes? It's ok when we do it but not when you do it? I don't know who to blame for this, but that's not my job. We have an entire branch of government (two of them actually) that are responsible for overseeing the behavior of the Executive. They need to do their jobs and take this all the way to the top if necessary.
I will say that the buck stops at the President's desk. I said this yesterday, if we're going to hold a President accountable for lying about a blow job, we might consider holding one accountable for war crimes. He can't have it both ways. He declared "war" against a feeling instead of a nation. A war without end as terror will always exist. He was a self-proclaimed wartime president partially because of Iraq and partially because of the war on terror. Well, wars have rules. We signed an agreement to obey them and he and his administration broke them. If any signatory to the Geneva Convention did so without investigation from their home country, the international community would be outraged and we're just starting to see that happen now.
C'mon President Obama. Looking forward is fine but in this case, we can't afford not to look back also.
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