General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Anyone who claims Obama called the torturers "patriots"... [View all]quaker bill
(8,262 posts)even in the worst case interpretation, the statement only puts the actions in context. The context was "shock and awe". We dropped 800 tons of high explosives on a city of 4 million people in an evening in a country that was not involved in 9/11 for no apparent good reason. Most of us (+/- 80%) cheered. This is the context.
I would support prosecution for this stuff, but I would not stop at torture.
All that said, we have known of the torture for many years, probably a decade at this point. There were no mass protests in the streets demanding resignations / high level prosecutions when the photos first came out, as unfortunate as that is.
The notion that Americans were largely indifferent to supportive of all of this can be seen in our lack of action at the time.
There are the "values" we "believe" in, and then there are the values we act on. The values we act on make us far less than exceptional.