The Torture Papers

The Obama administration has taken important steps toward repairing the grievous harm that President George W. Bush did to this nation with his lawless and morally repugnant detention policies. President Obama is committed to closing the Guantánamo Bay camp and creating legitimate courts to try detainees. He has rescinded the executive orders and the legal rulings that Mr. Bush used to excuse the abuse of prisoners.

The Defense Department has taken the important step of reversing policy and notifying the International Committee of the Red Cross of the identities of militants who were being held in secret at camps in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed a prosecutor to investigate the interrogation of prisoners of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose inhuman treatment was detailed in a long-secret report written by the agency’s inspector general in 2004 and released on Monday.

Yet despite these commendable individual steps, Mr. Obama and his political advisers continue to shrink from the broad investigation of the full range of his predecessor’s trampling on human rights, civil liberties and judicial safeguards that would allow this country to make sure this sordid history is behind it for good.

Indeed, the administration seemed reluctant to make public the C.I.A. report, which was released under a court order and was heavily censored, with whole pages blacked out — including the four pages of recommendations. Before Mr. Holder announced his investigation, the White House made it clear that it was unhappy with his decision — repeating its sadly familiar line about “looking forward, not backward.”

Mr. Holder displayed real courage and integrity in ordering the investigation. But he stressed that it was limited to the specific interrogations outlined in the C.I.A. report, and did not amount to a full-blown criminal investigation of the Bush-era detention policies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/26/opinion/26wed1.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

and deal with them, you're destined to repeat them.

He should also know that by not looking into the things done during the Bush years, he's allowing those wrongs to go unpunished, which sets a dangerous precedent going forward. Eventually, facts about the Bush years will be revealed. And I'm certain there are some real shocks hidden in those facts. By doing nothing, Obama's presidency will be forever tarnished.

Obama is a smart man, he should know better than to do what he's doing. I can only hope he has another plan that is going to take some time to implement, but as each day passes with nothing new, my hope for that grows dim.

for the next criminal regime who's bent on slaughtering thousands upon thousands of innocent people for political ends. As anyone of reasonable mind knows, such a regime will come to power and do it again at some point. President Obama is certainly NOT "looking forward" in this regard.

I don't care what they say. They'll get some poor slob CIA guy and put him on trial and in his testimony he will implicate someone further up the food chain. The story will repeat itself until it gets to where we all know it's headed anyway.

And they have to know this going in. They know they can't keep the lid on something this explosive. Cheney knows it too. He appears to be getting more than a bit concerned about the chain of events.

That's what his multitude of appearances amount to. That machine in his chest must be banging away.