Today I received an email from Congressman Robert Wexler. The congressman attended a Judiciary Committee hearing today and was pleased that at the hearing Attorney General Holder had stated that “ If somebody was tortured to death, clearly a crime would have occurred.” Congressman Wexler further noted that he was petitioning Attorney General Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor.
Well, one must certainly applaud the congressman’s efforts to get a Special Prosecutor appointed. But one would also have to ask why it has become necessary to petition the Attorney General to do so. Why hasn’t Holder done so already and without a petition? And one might also inquire of the Attorney General if a crime would have occurred if somebody had just been tortured and didn’t die.
The basic answer is that the stalling game and the semantics game goes on and on- and that’s exactly what Obama and Holder want. They don’t want to investigate and prosecute war crimes committed by Americans. They want to stall, distract, confuse- and ultimately bury- the issue. I hope that Congressman Wexler realizes that and that his stated pleasure with AG Holder’s pronouncement is just a matter of judicious diplomacy.
This entire matter is becoming more ridiculous each day. Anyone who is not brain-dead knows damn well that Bush and Cheney authorized practices which were clearly torture by the standards of international law. Americans prosecuted and convicted Japanese military personnel for water-boarding, which is clearly defined as a war crime. So how long is this nonsense going to go on? Obama hopes that he can stall and distract until the issue dies of old age. And the media are pretty much in his corner. Tonight on CNN, Anderson Cooper and Ed Henry were implying that it’s basically just “the far Left” that’s disturbed by Obama’s machinations, noting that the Republicans were pleased as punch by Obama’s tactics. Is that it- you have to be “far Left” to be disturbed by the failure to investigate and prosecute war crimes? More reasonable Americans aren’t troubled by such trivialities? Yes, just label the protests “far Left” and get on with business-as-usual. We have reached the point where the demand for the rule of law has been marginalized as something off-beat. Where do we go from here? I would rather not speculate.
