Big bro 43 lied when he promised to bring honor and dignity to the White House, but to the eyes of the world we are covering up his crimes against humanity because we know that W and his v.p., during their exit interviews to burnish W's legacy, clearly proclaimed that they facilitated the waterboarding of detainees. For partisan GOP gain they declared that they were willing to do anything possible to protect the US.

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He pledged to return honor and dignity to the White House but instead has made us accessories after the fact.

Why wouldn't terrorists hold W's enhanced interrogation crimes against common US citizens if we are obstructing justice in the prosecution of these crimes against humanity? If our populace demonstrated against W's crimes, then Congress would prosecute W for crimes he has openly admitted. For partisan GOP gain, W, and his mentor, Cheney, declared that they were willing to do anything possible to protect the U.S., unlike the Democrats, who were labeled as being weak on defending our country.

The Democrats are not terrorist facilitators. The Democrats are not going to make false choice hypocrisies for the US populace about being required to use Jack Bauer techniques against enemy combatants, and Obama's inaugural address dealt with this as he stated, "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers ... our found fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more."

The Democrats are unlike W and Cheney and wouldn't cause our citizenry to be in a situation in which we learned of the enhanced interrogation crimes after they had been committed and being forced to either help the criminals to conceal immoral acts---being a nation of "accessories after the fact," or prosecute the former regime, therefore alienating the GOP portion of the country. Thanks so very much W for putting us in this terrible situation.

In remarks that aired on German television on January 21st 2009, Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, urged the U.S. to pursue former President George W. Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld on charges that they authorized torture and other harsh interrogation techniques. He said "Judicially speaking, the United States has a clear obligation" to bring proceedings against Bush and Rumsfeld.
He noted Washington had ratified the UN convention on torture, which required "all means, particularly penal law" to be used to bring proceedings against those violating it.
"We have all these documents that are now publicly available that prove that these methods of interrogation were intentionally ordered by Rumsfeld," against detainees at the US prison facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Nowak said.

We have the same findings as the United Nations because a bipartisan Senate report released last month found that Rumsfeld bore major responsibility for abuses committed at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and other military detention centers. Just last week, a Bush administration official overseeing Gitmo trials said Rumsfeld approved the torture of one particular detainee. Bush himself said last year that he was aware of his advisers' discussions on torture and recently admitted that he personally authorized waterboarding Kalid Sheik Muhammad.

This is not a new finding by the United Nations. The May 8, 2004 article "UN Committee Could Investigate US, Britain" at click here states "The UN Committee Against Torture is currently meeting in Geneva to discuss whether member states have abided by the Geneva Convention. Experts say the Iraq torture charges could become an issue at the meeting.
The string of photos released by the media last week shocked the world. They showed pictures of naked Iraqi prisoners forced into degrading poses, sometimes simulating explicit sexual positions and sometimes being forced to wear women's underwear. In one photo, a man is held on a dog leash by a female prison guard. The images have damaged the credibility of the United States around the world and forced both President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to publicly apologize, with the latter going so far as to describe the incidents as a "catastrophe" for the United States."

Why hasn't the UN investigated it yet? Simple, the U.S. won't cooperate, as the article continues "But in the past, there have been few events where such proceedings have been opened. And whether or not the committee will order an investigation into the U.S. military is an open question, since the 10 committee members must take a unanimous decision to do so. That consensus could be difficult, since the United States, China and Russia are all members of the committee. There's a good chance the Americans would be unwilling to agree to an investigation if China and Russia were the main countries calling for it, since both countries have also been accused of committing torture in numerous instances.
But Mark Thomsen, the president of the Geneva Association for Torture Prevention, says the U.S. would be well advised to cooperate with the UN organizations in an effort to demonstrate its true desire to resolve the cases. "Any act of torture should be condemned and those that commit it should be punished," he says. "We therefore hope that that is what will now happen that there will be a thorough investigation and that the people who have committed these acts will be appropriately punished."

Thomsen has a naivete that Herr Karl will take advantage of, as Rove knew his common US masses' apathetic nature. Rove banked on the US main stream media's inability to generate the required hatred of W's criminal ways. Rove estimated that we'd all forget about words by a week after they were revealed, and pictures would take longer to excise from our red staters' memories, but that they tended towards being oblivious to all aspects of life other than struggling for survival.

Herr Karl has minions willing to confuse the red staters, such as GOP acolyte Senator Kit Bond, former vice-chair of the Senate intelligence overlook committee saying, "There are different ways of doing it. It's like swimming, freestyle, backstroke. The waterboarding could be used almost to define some of the techniques that our trainees are put through, but that's beside the point. It's not being used."

"Waterboarding is torture," said President Obama to George Stephanopoulos. Torture is a crime. Obama added, twice, that no one is "above the law," although also citing his "belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backward."

Obama's nominee for attorney general, Eric Holder, called waterboarding "torture" and his pick to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta, wrote in The Washington Monthly at
click here

"According to the latest polls, two-thirds of the American public believes that torturing suspected terrorists to gain important information is justified in some circumstances. How did we transform from champions of human dignity and individual rights into a nation of armchair torturers? One word: fear.
Fear is blinding, hateful, and vengeful. It makes the end justify the means. And why not? If torture can stop the next terrorist attack, the next suicide bomber, then what's wrong with a little waterboarding or electric shock?
The simple answer is the rule of law....
Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground.
We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances."

Holder and Panetta are good picks for those who want the US to do the right thing and prosecute W for crimes against defenseless detainees.

Maybe Obama's administration won't prosecute W for torture, but if we don't, will the UN? Will the US vote against the UN prosecuting W for torture?

If we don't prosecute W then we are accessories after the fact - therefore culpable for the crimes. Why wouldn't terrorists hold these crimes against us?

Authors Bio:
Winston Smith is an ex-Social Worker. I worked in child welfare, and in medical settings and in homeless settings. In the later our facility was geared as a permanent address for people to apply for welfare. Once they received that we could send them to facilities in which their welfare paid the bill and provided enough for a meager existence. We also referred people to vocational rehabilitation services. Many of the people who came to us were people who were clearly emotionally ill, but Reagan's slashing of the services for these people caused them to become homeless. One woman I dealt with-St. Jane, believed she was in direct communication with God, urinated freely without using the facilities and she had 47 bags of trash which were prized possessions. She got welfare and was sent to a facility were she could survive. The rule was that our facility could be used 1 time only as we had too many people who thought that the services that we provided we would lift them from the dire straights that they were in. Well, we provided our services for St. Jane around Thanksgiving. On Christmas Eve she was back with her 47 bags of trash and wanted to stay at our facility. I informed my superior of this situation, but we declined to provide services for St. Jane. She slept in front of our facility in a snowstorm. The local rag took the picture and excoriated us for what we did. The local welfare department asked her where she would like to live. St. Jane said Chicago because she liked the wind. She knew on one there. She and her 47 bags of trash of were carted onto a train for the windy city and never of again. The local welfare department was glad to get shed of her. Social welfare in the mid-1980's was geared to blame the victim. Ill people were sent home from hospitals were no one was going to help them because social welfare budgets were slashed by Reagan. Bush 41's â"thousand points of lightâ" was just another way to shaft the weakest in our society. Bush 43's faith based initiative was just another attempt to reduce social welfare services. Reagan's â"Just say Noâ" was the pinnacle of hypocrisy. No services for those who desperately needed them under the guise of tough love.

Obviously I became burnt out by too much indifference regarding our weak and weary. I couldn't look at desperate people and could not get myself to say that what I could offer them wouldn't really help themâ"”it would only get them out of my office to be another person's problem, until the local welfare department carted them away.

I had little interest in politics until the illegal Iraq War started. Growing up in the 1960's caused me to understand that the GOP used war to attract right-wing extremists to vote for them. When â"Tricky Dick'sâ" secret plan to end the Vietnam War unfolded into elongating our presence there for 8 years I knew that I would never believe a GOP war-monger again. I dislike Obama's plan to escalate our presence in Afghanistan and see it as a craven attempt to placate the GOP. Maybe he'll reduce the GOP's attacks against him, but it will at the expense of alienating his base.