Featured Post for 05-/15-05/22: Obama at this point, by covering up for official torture, and by signing on to and expanding the war in Afghanistan, is dooming his presidency, further staining the reputation of the United States, and ultimately furthering the decline of the country that was set in motion by his predecessors.

The illogic of Obama’s position on these photos is stunning. Since we know the photos exist, the refusal to make them public can only feed a sense that they must be worse than the horrific photos of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison which were already released. Nobody is going to assume that the photos in the White House’s possession are less offensive than what has already been discovered and made public–for why would the administration be worried about that?

The truth is always better than a cover-up, and what we now have the president advocating is a cover-up of American torture.  FULL STORY

Should Congress or the US Department of Justice – or perhaps Spanish Investigating Magistrate Baltasar Garzon – ever decide to seriously prosecute those in the US who are responsible for the Bush/Cheney administration’s policy of torturing captives in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and the so-called “War” on Terror, they should go back and examine the case of imprisoned American John Walker Lindh, the young man who was captured with Taliban fighters back in the early days of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. FULL ARTICLE

Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s ‘War on Terror,’ and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for ‘carrying a weapon’ in Afghanistan and for ‘providing assistance’ to an enemy of the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all, it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies that trade with proscribed countries on a government ‘no trade’ list like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for the executives involved. FULL ARTICLE

Had William Shakespeare been reincarnated as a modern-day president of the United States, he might have modified one of his more famous quotes to say: “the better part of justice is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my presidency.” It did apply to Gerald Ford with his pardon of Richard Nixon; it did apply to Bill Clinton as well with his unwillingness to disinter and do the forensics on the cadaver of the Iran-Contra affair; and it does apply today to our current president, Barack Obama, and his promise not to prosecute CIA officials on the critical issue of torture. FULL ARTICLE

Shocking evidence from a classified Senate Armed Services Committee report released last week makes the most compelling case to date that senior Bush administration officials intentionally lied about torture.

Under the bright lights of national news cameras, President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld described the horrors of Abu Ghraib as acts committed by a “few bad apples,” when in fact, they were actively encouraging the armed forces to torture prisoners at detention centers worldwide.

The details in this and other documents recently released should send chills down your spine. They confirm our worst nightmares about the types of interrogation tactics approved, including slamming suspects into walls, waterboarding 2 individuals a combined 266 times and exploiting another’s fear of insects by confining him in a box with an insect. Continue reading →

Dear Mr. President,

Shakespeare said it best: ” The fault dear Brutus, is not in our stars….. But in ourselves.”

The fault, Mr. President, in our present situation, is ‘ not in our stars… But in our stripes.’

The American stars are something to be proud of, sir. Represented by the stars on our flag, they stand for truth and justice for all. It seems to me, that the stripes that are represented on our flag, now stand for the stripes worn by our detainees , and for the stripes that we force other nations to wear when we dominate them. Continue reading →

Here’s how well they have us trained: The powers that be are no longer gonna call the illegally detained terrorism suspects (sic) by the name of “enemy combatants.”

Like the pre-programmed robots we’ve all become, we’ll celebrate this as a welcome and much-needed change from the reviled Bush-Cheney administration. A step in the right direction, we might even say. Continue reading →

On the one hand, we have President Obama assuring us that under his administration, there will be respect for the rule of law, and on the other hand we have this one-time constitutional law professor and his attorney general declaiming that there is no need for the appointment of a prosecutor to bring charges against the people in the last administration, in the CIA, in the National Security Agency and in the Defense Department and the military who clearly have broken the law in serious and felonious ways. FULL ARTICLE

War crimes are not exclusive to the military and are often perpetrated through command from the political top down. Many Nazis were prosecuted following WWII that never pulled a trigger or gassed an individual, yet sent orders and directives aimed at genocide, torture and or illegal mass executions. FULL ARTICLE

A letter to my local county prosecutor

Dear John,

I live in this area. I am asking you, as county prosecutor,  to go forward with the process to hold both George Bush and Dick Cheney criminally responsible for the illegal attack on Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of over 4000 of our soldiers and countless Iraqi civilians. It is time that we, as citizens, do what even our new President Obama stated in his press conference: ” No One is above the law… ”

Please contact Mr. Vincent Bugliosi for information on what you could and should be doing to bring justice to these men.

Remember the famous quote: “Let justice prevail … or may the heavens fall! “