Torture: President Obama Gives Nation a Chance to Regain Moral Bearings
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009During the latter stages of the Bush presidency, the outgoing president sought to put a positive spin on his ultimate legacy. In fact, throughout his tumultuous years in office, the outgoing president insisted that as time passed people would judge his accomplishments more positively.
Any chance for such a development seemingly went out the window over the last ten days with the emergence of the so-called torture memos.
Loss of Moral Bearings
With the release of the paper trail authorizing the brutal interrogation of terror suspects, President Barack Obama has opened the door on an administration that gave little thought to the long-term ramifications of its actions.
Leaving the option for prosecution to the attorney general’s office, Obama has clearly differentiated the issue into two categories: those who approved the harsh interrogation tactics and those who carried out the program at the behest of the Bush administration.
The release of the materials has most of the former administration scrambling. In an effort to dissuade the growing criticism, Bush Vice President Dick Cheney has attacked Obama for releasing the Justice Department memos maintaining that the methods helped protect the nation.
Three men currently seem to be most at risk of prosecution because of their role in formulating the legal decisions behind the interrogation methods. The three men are former Justice Department officials Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury.
Bybee is currently a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals while Yoo is a professor at the University of California-Berkeley. The professor has already drawn a great deal of scrutiny on campus with some calling for the firing of the tenured professor.
While the men will clearly take the position they were simply doing their jobs, legal experts have suggested that the men could face charges that include conspiracy to commit felonies including torture. Newspaper reports also indicate that Bybee also could face impeachment in Congress.
New Report
Adding to the issue for the former administration is a new declassified Congressional report. That report offers detailed evidence that the “military’s use of harsh interrogation methods on terrorism suspects was approved at high levels of the Bush administration.”
This report centers upon the interrogations carried out by the military as opposed to those conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency. Offering an extremely damning portrait of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others, the report rejects claims that Pentagon policies played no role in the abusive treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
According to the Senate investigation, Rumsfeld approved 15 interrogation techniques to be utilized at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The report then tracks Rumsfeld’s authorization through a United States military special-operations lawyer in Afghanistan to the interrogation officer in charge at Abu Ghraib.
This led directly to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez authorizing the use of stress positions, “sleep management” and military dogs to prey upon detainees’ fears.
Not too surprisingly, former Secretary Rumsfeld has dismissed the report calling the findings unfounded allegations.
Time to Right Some Wrongs
While Republicans continue to fight any further scrutiny of these sordid matters, Democratic lawmakers and human rights groups are demanding hearings. These groups want to see punishment for those involved in sanctioning brutal interrogations that were tantamount to torture.
While the focus currently centers upon Yoo, Bigbee and Bradbury and the potential consequences for their actions, there now has to be a call to review the cases of some punished individuals.
If the president continues to maintain that those CIA officers that carried out the harsh interrogation techniques are not to be prosecuted, then it would seem only right to re-examine the military hearings related to the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Clearly, the actions of the military personnel punished for their behavior at the famous prison were not, as the administration contended at the time, the actions of a few rogue individuals.
Janis Karpinski, the commander of Abu Ghraib, who was demoted for her lack of oversight regarding the abuse should have her case re-examined. And the seven soldiers who were convicted in courts martial and sentenced to federal prison should also have their cases opened in light of these revelations.
It is clearly way too early to judge the Obama presidency despite the onslaught of criticism coming from former VP Dick Cheney.
But if our former president was in hope that time was on his side, that his presidency would be judged more positively with the passage of time, it is now clear that time will only cast further clouds on his administration.
Given his authorization to torture prisoners, his name is now being mentioned in the same sentences as Pol Pot considered one of the most evil men of all time.
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To determine the pollution effects, 24/7 Wall St. queried the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program’s public online database. The database consists of the annual collected EPA data regarding the release and transfer of specific toxic chemicals and the waste management activities at specific industrial locations.