The Resistance: Destroying One Weapon

That list of Muslims that Smirky/Darth started and the Orange Menace was hoping to use to launch his unconstitutional deportation of non-christians?

It's gone.  President Barack Obama destroyed it.

Alex Daugherty
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Posted with permission from Tribune Content Agency 

 

Republish
Reprint

WASHINGTON — In 2001, Roskana Mun was a 16-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant living in one of New York City's most diverse neighborhoods. After 9/11, the U.S. government started tracking foreign Muslim men and boys, and Mun's neighborhood changed as men were detained and in some cases deported.

"Women had to juggle raising a whole family and face the threat of detention," Mun said. "Girls had to step up, and young people who were 13 or 14 years old had to quit school to work."

Mun now works for DRUM, a New York-based advocacy group for South Asian immigrants. She said the U.S. government's tracking of men from Muslim-majority countries for a decade had disrupted daily life, causing shops to close in neighborhoods like Midwood, Brooklyn, after hundreds of men were deported.

The tracking program administered by the Department of Homeland Security, called the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, required males 16 and older from 25 countries to undergo additional vetting in the interest of national security.

After 10 years and 13,000 deportations, President Barack Obama stopped enforcing the program in 2011. It hadn't caught a single terrorist.

On Thursday, the DHS announced that the regulatory framework for the system has been dismantled, effectively gutting a quasi-Muslim registry just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump enters the White House. The move prevents the dormant program from being quickly restarted to track the movements of certain Muslim men living in the United States.

The Constitution.  It's not just for white, straight, christian, male wingnuts.

Rich White People Are Evil in So Many Ways

Think about it.  Every single terrible thing that has happened in this country has been perpetrated by rich white people, from slavery and native genocide through 9/11 (yes, bin Laden is the spawn of an obscenely rich white family), the Iraq Catastrophe and the Great Wall Street Economic Fuckery.

Chris Hedges at TruthDig:

Michael Kraus, Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner, social scientists at the University of California, did research that led them to conclude that the poor have more empathy than the rich. The poor, they argued, do not have the ability to dominate their environments. They must build relationships with others to survive. This requires that they be able to read the emotions of those around them and respond. It demands that they look after each other. And this makes them more empathetic. The rich, who can control their environments, do not need to bother with the concerns or emotions of others. They are in charge. What they want gets done. And the longer they live at the center of their own universe, the more callous, insensitive and cruel they become.

The rich white family has an unrivaled aptitude for crime. Members of rich white families run corporations into the ground (think Lehman Brothers), defraud stockholders and investors, sell toxic mortgages as gold-plated investments to pension funds, communities and schools, and then loot the U.S. Treasury when the whole thing implodes. They steal hundreds of millions of dollars on Wall Street through fraud and theft, pay little or no taxes, almost never go to jail, write laws and regulations that legalize their crimes and then are asked to become trustees at elite universities and sit on corporate boards. They set up foundations and are admired as philanthropists. And if they get into legal trouble, they have high-priced lawyers and connections among the political elites to get them out.

You have to hand it to rich white families. They steal with greater finesse than anyone else. If you are a poor black teenager and sprint out of a CVS with a few looted bottles of shampoo, you are likely to be shot in the back or sent to jail for years. If there were an Olympiad for crime, rich white families would sweep up all the medals; blacks would be lucky to come within a mile of the first elimination trial. I don’t know why black people even try to compete in this area. They are, by comparison, utter failures as criminals. The monarchs of crime are rich white people, who wallow in their pilfered wealth while locking away in prisons a huge percentage of poor men of color.

Rich white families are also the most efficient killers on the planet. This has been true for five centuries, starting with the conquest of the Americas and the genocide against Native Americans, and continuing through today’s wars in the Middle East. Rich white families themselves don’t actually kill. They are not about to risk their necks on city streets or in Iraq. They hire people, often poor, to kill for them. Rich white families wanted the petroleum of Iraq and, by waving the flag and spewing patriotic slogans, got a lot of poor kids to join the military and take the oil fields for them. Rich white people wanted endless war for the benefit of their arms industry and got it by calling for a war on terror. Rich white people wanted police to use lethal force against the poor with impunity and to arrest them, swelling U.S. prisons with 25 percent of the world’s prison population, so they set up a system of drug laws and militarized police departments to make it happen.

 Read the whole amazing thing.

American Sucker

We'll be rid of racism before we're rid of jingoism.

Rude Pundit:

American Sniper is a film about stupid people who were brainwashed into doing something stupid and it justifies their stupidity so that the stupid people watching can feel good about themselves. See, the one thing you can't separate out from the film is history. It tries to elide over history, but just because it isn't mentioned doesn't mean it isn't there. Because of that, the overwhelming feeling the Rude Pundit had was pity, not pride.

SNIP

So, in the end, American Sniper is the story of a dumb man who wrecked himself for a worthless cause and about all the young men (and it is all, mostly white, men in it) who were sacrificed for nothing.

It's not the film that tells us it's nothing. We know it was for nothing. We know that one of the great crimes of the new century is the invasion of Iraq for absolutely no rational, demonstrable reason. We know that all those "savages," as Kyle calls the Iraqis, that we killed were for nothing. We know that all those Americans who died lost their lives for nothing. Our military was protecting us from nothing. Our freedoms weren't at risk from Iraq.

And the lie many soldiers from Iraq cling to and the lie we tell ourselves, and the lie that so many have worked so hard to maintain, is that as long as we don't discuss that it was for nothing, as long as we pretend that the fact that soldiers fought when they were told to fight and, mostly, did so nobly, we don't have to face the truly gut-wrenching reality of our national complicity in the crime.

SNIP

We're supposed to feel proud that men like Kyle defend us.  We should instead feel intensely angry that they died in vain.

Honor Those Who Said No to Torture

If we don't prosecute and imprison the torturers and the ones who planned, justified and excused it, then at the very least let us honor those who refused to torture.

Jon Weiner at The Nation:

Hidden in the Senate torture report are stories of some heroes—people inside the CIA who from the beginning said torture was wrong, who tried to stop it, who refused to participate. There were also some outside the CIA, in the military and the FBI, who risked careers and reputations by resisting—and who sometimes paid a heavy price. They should be thanked and honored.

But President Obama hasn’t mentioned them. Instead, he praised the CIA officials who presided over the torture regime as “patriots.”

We should “celebrate the ones who stood up for what was right,” says David Luban of the Georgetown University law school, author of Torture, Power and Law. Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, author of the definitive book on Bush administration torture, The Dark Side, calls them “the real torture patriots.”

SNIP

The heroes in the torture report include Ali Soufan, former FBI agent and interrogator of terrorists who, according to Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower, came closer than anyone to preventing the 9/11 attacks. Soufan has argued publicly against torture and in favor of “rapport-building” as the best technique to get information from suspects. The CIA heavily censored his memoir The Black Banners in what Wright called an effort “to punish a critic and to obscure history.” He was featured in a Frontline documentary made by Martin Smith and James Gilmore.

Another hero: Alberto Mora. As general counsel of the Navy in 2004, Jane Mayer reported, he tried to stop the torture program. He told his superiors at the Pentagon that the Bush torture policy violated the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition of torture and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” He described the Bush program as “unlawful” and “dangerous,” and warned that the torturers could face criminal prosecution. He was featured in the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side by Alex Gibney (which won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2007).

Some of the heroes were ordinary soldiers, like Sgt. Joe Darby, who first revealed the Abu Ghraib abuses. As a result,” Luban points out, he “had to live under armed protection for six months.” Others were high officials, like Philip Zelikow, an adviser to Condoleezza Rice, who, Luban reports, wrote an “anti-torture memo” that the White House “attempted to destroy.”

And there was Ian Fishback, an army captain who reported that his own unit was abusing Iraqi prisoners. Eventually he wrote an open letter to Senator John McCain, asking, “Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security?” His answer: “I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is ‘America.’ ”

Finally we have the case of Guantaánamo prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who refused to prosecute a teenager who had been abused in US detention in Afghanistan and Guantánamo. For that decision, Jameel Jaffer and Larry Siems report, Vandeveld was “barred from the prosecutors’ office, confined to his residence and threatened with dismissal from the Army.”

SNIP

The ACLU has set up a web page with a petition to President Obama to “honor those who said no to torture.”

And make sure everyone knows that waterboarding was the least of it and the CIA wasn't alone.

Digby:

I think people don't realize how much anal rape was going on. It wasn't just those "high value" detainees and it didn't happen just a couple of times.

SNIP

Folks, they were raping these prisoners and they knew they were raping these prisoners. It wasn't just the CIA, it was the Pentagon too.

The Most Horrible Reason of All

My theory is not as despicable as Charlie Pierce fears: I think they kept torturing because they were getting off on it.  The methods are just too similar to BDSM practices for coincidence.

I do not want to believe what I am about to write. I think it's possible that the barbarians in the White House tortured people in order to produce statements they could use to validate further their bullshit case for their bullshit war. Even I don't want to believe that we were ruled for eight years by that species of monster. If that is the case, however, somewhere at the CIA there's a memo, and somewhere there's somebody in a cubicle that knows where the memo is, and who knows the phone number of a reporter. I suspect the Christmas card list at the Cheney household will be lengthy for the next several decades.

Pardon the Torturers? Convict Them First

Our current problems started when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon before Nixon had been charged with his many crimes, much less convicted.

That put every fascist motherfucker in the repug party on notice that governmental power was a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card.

It's been an out-of-control slide downhill every since, from wiretapping through Iran-Contra (google it, children) all the way to torture.

Pardoning won't stop it.  Pardoning will make it worse

Digby:

President Obama will not do this, I'm sure. It would open the door for some successor to "pardon" him to make a political point. But it's a very potent statement anyway: the only way we can even acknowledge that a crime was committed is to pardon the people who committed it after the statute of limitations has run out.

And I'm afraid I don't see that it would close the Pandora's box of torture. The minute they get the chance the torture advocates will simply make it legal. The taboo has been broken and banking on the law is a losing propositions in these situations. This is now a cultural problem more than a legal problem.

Back in the day the conservatives all used to wring their hands over what was happening in Bill Clinton's pants, asking the plaintive question, "what can we tell the children?" Sex is always a dicey thing to talk about with kids and I'm sure there were some uncomfortable moments around American dinner tables. What else is new?

But what in the hell do you tell your kids about torture? That some people think the "effective way to get to the truth"? That they shouldn't swing the cat around by the tail but in the hands of trained investigators it's ok? This was never a hard question before. Torture was never ok, always wrong, you simply cannot do it ever. That's not true anymore. Leaders in our country, very important people, are now saying that torture is not immoral. We're going backwards.

Steve M. has the definitive argument against pardons.

He concludes:

For the foreseeable future, we will never arrive at a bipartisan consensus that torture is wrong. Support for what they still consider mere "enhanced interrogation" is as much a tribal marker for conservatives as opposition to Obamacare or climate-change denialism. We lost the right on this issue a decade ago, John McCain and his friends excepted. They're not coming back.

They Knew It Was Wrong When They Did It

Gee, if only some powerful country had already - maybe seven decades ago - established the principle that "I was just following orders" is not an acceptable excuse for torture.

Digby:

Nobody's family deserves to be targeted and the government should protect them from harm if they are. But I  do not buy the excuse that the people who did this were just doing what they were told and bear no responsibility.  They could have said no.  Nothing terrible would have happened to them if they had.  And if they had resisted this program would likely not have gone forward.

I sincerely don't wish that any of these people become victims of violence. But there needed to be a reckoning for this hideous, immoral policy and this is the inadequate, weaselly way we've come up with.  It would be nice if I believed it would shock the consciences of Americans so much that they would insist it never happen again but from the looks of it, that's not going to happen.  After tomorrow, the Republican Party (and some Democratic hawks who operate out of fear and intimidation) are going to be officially pro-torture.

We will be fighting about this for a long time to come unfortunately.  And these operatives who could have said no bear some responsibility for that as well.

QOTD

DR Tucker at Political Animal:

I’ll say this about Nixon: he was wrong, crooked, and vile in a great many ways—but on his worst day, he was better than George W. Bush.

Yes We Did, Yes We Do and Yes We Will Keep Torturing Until the Bush/Cheney War Criminals Are in Prison

Charles Pierce, on the dangers of infection:

For years, our herd immunity on these matters consisted of a general consensus that there were some things that the United States simply could not do and remain the country we told ourselves and the world that we were. We believed that there were things that were unthinkable, and that kept us at least partly safe from an outbreak of our worst impulses. That herd immunity will not be rebuilt easily. It will take a steady intellectual and political inoculation against the worst in us all. And we must contain the spread of the infection as best we can, and not listen to those people who tell us that what always has worked in the past for us endangers us now.

An elderly European acquaintance of mine recently died. Someone who remembered World War II, and the American soldiers who liberated them.  Someone who loved Barack Obama because he represented what to her generation was the very best of America: our honor and our goodness and our refusal to surrender to evil.

I cannot read this report without wondering how I could possibly look her in the eye.

If Pierce's conclusion is too vague for you, try this:

Eric Fair was an Arabic linguist in the U.S. Army from 1995 to 2000 and then, in 2004, he worked as a contract interrogator in Iraq. He remains haunted by what he did there.

In April 2004 I was stationed at a detention facility in Fallujah. Inside the detention facility was an office. Inside the office was a small chair made of plywood and two-by-fours. The chair was two feet tall. The rear legs were taller than the front legs. The seat and chair back leaned forward. Plastic zip ties were used to force a detainee into a crouched position from which he could not recover. It caused muscle failure of the quads, hamstrings and calves. It was torture.

The detainees in Fallujah were the hardest set of men I’ve ever come upon. Many killed with a sickening enthusiasm. They often butchered what remained of their victims. It is easy to argue that they deserved far worse than what we delivered.

Still, those tactics stained my soul in an irrevocable way, maybe justifiably so. But as members of our government and its agencies continue to defend our use of torture, and as the American people continue to ignore their obligation to uncover this sordid chapter, the stain isn’t mine alone.

Jose Rodriguez Jr., the former head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, insists that those who suggest we question more gently have never felt the burden of protecting innocent lives. I’ve felt that burden. And when the time came, I did not question gently.

I’m dealing with my own burdens now. My marriage is struggling. My effectiveness as a parent is deteriorating. My son is suffering. I am no longer the person I once was. I try to repent. I work to confess. I hope for atonement.

As a country, we need to know what happened. We need to confess. We need to be specific. We need to open the book.

When Do the War Criminals Manning Exposed Go on Trial?

 The crime isn't the crime; exposing the crime is the crime.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

I don’t object to Manning being charged with a crime. I certainly strongly object to the way he was treated in prison. And I think the idea that his leaks merit a 35-year sentence is absurd. And as I said before, it’s particularly appalling when you consider the Obama administration’s “look forward not back” approach on torture. It’s hard to square this life-ruining sentence with the fact that no torturer was even considered worthy of being charged. I’d also say that at this point that it’s pretty hard to the American government to complain when other countries refuse to extradite whistleblowers.

Charles Pierce cuts to the heart of it.

The Crime of What We Did to PFC Manniing

First, Gary Younge nailed it

Gary YoungeVerified account @garyyounge

 

Exposing war crimes gets you 130 years. http://bit.ly/13w4610 
Committing them gets you a library. http://bit.ly/Mp2ljA  #Manning
6:41 PM - 30 Jul 13

Chase Madar at The Nation explains it:

Many intellectuals have labored to draw casuistic distinctions between what they see as Manning’s irresponsible leaking and Daniel Ellsberg’s virtuous leaking of the Pentagon Papers some forty years ago. These exercises zealously avoid the main legal difference: the thousands of documents leaked by Ellsberg were uniformly classified as “top secret,” whereas nothing released by Manning is of that high status. Meanwhile, Ellsberg himself has been a tireless defender of the young soldier, and on a weekly basis has had to reprise Marshall McLuhan’s famous scene in Annie Hall against Manning’s smug detractors. 

SNIP

After all, the transgression of this soldier is far greater than being a freethinking queer in the military. Private Manning actually believed that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be about Iraqi freedom. He thought he should be a well-informed citizen soldier, and he thought civilians should know the truth about the war that was being fought in their name.

SNIP

But Private Manning broke the law—and the law is the law! This folk tautology ought to be airtight, but it carries a whiff of desperation, of depleted authority on the verge of meltdown. It turns out that selective enforcement of military law is pervasive. Sexual assault is rarely punished. Laws against killing foreign civilians are worth even less: just ask the Marine unit that killed twenty-four Iraqi civilians in Haditha, some of them execution style, without any of the soldiers serving time in prison (the leader of the unit suffered only a reduction in rank and a pay cut). The law in these instances may be many things, but it is not a prescriptive rule enforced evenly and impartially. And yet the request for clemency in the case of Bradley Manning is treated as an outrageous and whiny exception, which if granted would bring about the collapse of all military discipline. 
The laws against releasing classified material are just as elastic. Barely a week goes by without The New York Times or The Washington Post spilling government secrets. This complaisant nonenforcement of leaks is nothing to complain about: after all, it’s how we learned the truth about—to name just a few salient examples from recent history—Vietnam, Watergate, warrantless wiretapping and the cyberwar against Iran.

SNIP

But it is Bradley Manning we have put on trial, not the impresarios of war, not the CIA torturers or their lawyers. The Iraq War, which began with a lurid overture of secrecy and lies, is now getting its dissonant coda: a private court-martialed for telling the truth, a trial unfolding behind a thick wall of official secrecy, in which the court’s media center was, on the day of the prosecution’s closing statement, patrolled by armed soldiers peering over the shoulders of typing reporters. “Pfc. Manning was not a humanist. He was a hacker,” said prosecutor Maj. Ashden Fein. “He was not a whistleblower. He was a traitor.” The past decade has witnessed the carnage unleashed by militarized cluelessness. In the story of Bradley Manning, who has been the ethical citizen and who the rampaging criminals?

Comey's One Act of "Heroism" Does Not Erase His Crimes

Before mass swoons over James Comey paralyze the nation, let's remember that President Obama's likely nominee to head the currently-in-very-deep-shit FBI is about as far from a defender of Americans' civil rights as you can get this side of Rand Paul.

Brad Friedman:

Lest you get the idea, after all of this, that we're lauding Comey for anything more than the seemingly heroic behavior he describes on the night in question and concerning the matter discussed in his testimony, here is a cautious reminder about who Comey is, from the ACLU's Executive Director Anthony D. Romero, in response to reports of Comey's nomination to FBI Director:

As the second-highest ranked Justice Department official under John Ashcroft, Comey approved some of the worst abuses committed by the Bush administration. Specifically, the publicly available evidence indicates Comey signed off on enhanced interrogation techniques that constitute torture, including waterboarding. He also oversaw the indefinite detention without charge or trial of an American citizen picked up in the United States and then held for years in a military brig. Although Comey, despite tremendous pressure from the Bush White House, deserves credit for courageously stopping the reauthorization of a secret National Security Agency program, he reportedly approved programs that struck at the very core of who we all are as Americans.

Nor should we forget to ask - as many people did at the time -  just what kind of program could be horrible and unconstitutional enough to make the guy who thought nothing of OKing torture and indefinite detention of American citizens say "no, uh-unh, not that!"

Yet Another Nation That Is Not the U.S. Manages to Convict a Former Leader of War Crimes

Mott was the quintessential American Project: a fascist psychopath we put in power and propped up for decades just because he wasn't a commie. That he massacred millions in the name of national security is just egregious icing on the irony cake.

And as Erik Loomis reminds us:

Of course, his supporters in the United States still hold major positions of importance within the Republican Party foreign party apparatus.

When Obama Disappoints/Infuriates You Again - and You Know He Will - Read This

Think Progress:

The five living presidents will meet in Texas on Thursday to dedicate the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. And while Bush and his aides are using the occasion to soften the 43 president’s image and solidify his legacy, a recounting of Bush-era policies — from his deregulation of Wall Street to the invasion of Iraq — greatly undermine the new rosy narrative of the Bush years:

Read the whole thing. Read it every time you wonder why the fuck you voted for Obama.

Prosecuting War Criminals Years Later

Let's all hope Smirky and Darth and their minions lives very very long lives - so they can spend many years in prison after they are convicted of Iraq war crimes.

From Firedoglake:

As the Rios Montt genocide and crimes against humanity trial illustrates, Guatemalan “prosecutors are taking long-dormant human rights cases to court, armed with evidence that victims and their advocates have painstakingly compiled over more than a decade”.

What We Dare Call Treason

From Divine Irony:

Colin Powell is a Warmongering Coward and Always WIll Be

He knew. He has admitted that he knew he was lying and he knew what the consequences would be. Motherfucker. No, he does not get an iota of respect from me ever.


mugsy at Crooks and Liars:

Ten years ago today (February 5, 2003) then Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his infamous PowerPoint Presentation before a full session of the U.N., detailing "evidence" of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons development along with the development of advanced delivery systems.

(GlobalSecurity has the entire 45 slide presentation, plus videos, here.)

With a bit of Googling, I was able to find out just what became of each site/item depicted in these slides. Not a single item shown that day turned out to be true. While reviewing these slides, keep in mind that the United States went to war, and over 4,000 American troops (not to mention and untold number of Iraqi civilians) died based on the claims made in these slides.

(Author's Note: I suppose I have to tell insane Right-Wingers that this post should IN NO WAY be misconstrued as a "defense" of Saddam Hussein. The dictator of Iraq was a monster and earned his place in hell, but the world is FULL of evil dictators and the U.S. cannot be responsible for deposing all of them. Likewise, thousands of U.S. and coalition troops gave their lives fighting a war based on the "evidence" presented in this slideshow, and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians died. In fact, arguably, more Iraqis died in our 8-year war than under the 24-year reign of Saddam Hussein.)

(Additional videos below the fold.)

Just under 4,500 U.S. troops, 300+ coalition troops, and over 110,000 confirmed Iraqi civilians were killed (with some estimates topping 1million) in a war based on this misinformation. To this day, not a single Bush Administration official has been prosecuted for their role in drumming up this case for war (not to mention the crimes that followed. See : Abu Ghraib.)

Where War Criminal Ex-Presidents Get Trials, Not Rich Retirement

Funny how it's all those Latin American hellholes we used to deride as banana republics who have figured out what we can't: that you can't move ahead until you solve what's behind you.

Firedoglake:

A Guatemalan judge has ruled that Ex-President, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, will be tried for genocide, specifically for killing 1,771 indigenous Mayans in 1982-83.  Read it and weep.

Genocide Works, Too

I haven't seen the CIA's latest propaganda flick and will not - I'm not into torture porn.

But I am deeply dismayed - no, thoroughly disgusted - that the debate spawned by the film centers on the accuracy of the film's central premise that torture works.

"Does torture work?" Of course it does: it works to terrorize and punish and satisfy the sadomasochistic masturbatory fantasies of infantile monsters like Dick Cheney.

Genocide works, too.  If your goal is to eliminate your enemies, nothing works like genocide.  It's amazingly effective. Why don't we commit genocide?

For the same reason we used to not even consider using torture: it's a fucking war crime.

Supposedly the movie ends with the death of bin Laden.  It should have ended with every single military, contract and CIA torturer and all their superiors right up to Cheney and George W. Bush being frog-marched off to prison.

During discussion of the movie and its meaning on Up With Chris Hayes Saturday, not one single person - not the "liberal" Chris Hayes, not Glenn Greenwald, not the representative of the ACLU - so much as hinted that by committing torture - and giving government approval to committing tortune -  Americans have committed war crimes and should be prosecuted.

Not one word dedicated to the proposition that torture is unacceptable under all circumstances and must not be tolerated in any form.

That we Americans are actually debating torture is absolutely the most shameful development in my lifetime.

 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Torture is Now Legal

No, I cut President Obama no slack whatsoever on this. If he restores American democracy as thoroughly as FDR did, this will be his Japanese Detention - the mistake that forever stains his legacy.

But let's not forget that this is a failure to prosecute crimes committed by the Bush/Cheney war criminals - conceived by them, approved by them, bragged about by them.

Let's not forget that the failure to prosecute comes in a poisoned atmosphere of borderline-treasonous obstruction of the president by the very party that established the torture regime.

Let's not forget to add "legal torture" to the legacy of the republican party's pathological racism.

 

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money 

That’s the effect of the Obama administration’s final determination that no official, high or petty, should be held accountable for the Bush administration’s institutionalized torture regime. Laws on the books are beside the point if it’s clear they can be violated with impunity. And while there are very real barriers to successful prosecutions that are beyond the administration’s control, the idea that there wasn’t a single torture case that was as worthy of resources as, say, steroid witch hunt cases that wouldn’t be worth pursuing even if the government actually had a case is not plausible.

Update: [PC] Related thoughts.