Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Meet the new boss...

"the new administration -- the new DOJ -- had actively reviewed this case and vetted the Bush positions and decisively opted to embrace the same positions."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/09/state_secrets/index.html

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gee, could it be that the job is slightly more complicated (read hard) than people thought?

BadTux said...

More likely it's because of another factor. As Republican sycophants were falling all over themselves to justify vast expansions of executive power for President George W. Bush, I pointed out to them, sanely, "do you want President Hillary Clinton to have those powers too?" Because the sad reality is that nobody seems to give up power willingly, and my point was that not only were they justifying these powers in the hands of their favorite "guy I'd like to have a drink with", they were also making sure that when a Democratic president was elected, said Democratic president would use those same powers -- maybe against them.

We don't have President Hillary Clinton, much to my surprise, but President Obama isn't any less immune to the call of power as any of his predecessors. So color me unsurprised. Disappointed, but unsurprised.

BTW, the interrogation procedures used are *not* a secret. We've released the poor slobs. They're babbling all over the place to human rights groups about what was done to them, which includes tactics that make waterboarding look like day in the park, such horrifying things as slitting their penises then sticking them into salt water in order to "motivate" them to talk (you do *not* want to see the photograph of the scarred aftermath, but one of the British tabloids has published it). The only purpose of arguing "state's secrets" right now is to protect officials from being prosecuted for their misdeeds, not because their misdeeds are secret. They're not. We have documentary proof, including photographs of the aftermath of the torture. It may be secret from the U.S. Court system, and from a racist U.S. public that believes anybody brown is a bad person and thus okay to torture, but the world knows what happened. It is sad, and disgraceful, that the Obama regime continues to stonewall here. But not surprising. Alas, not surprising.