Let's hold Bush officials accountable for torture

[ProSense]

Let's hold Bush officials accountable for torture

The ACLU's executive director joins with a military officer to ask for a special prosecutor for torture

By Anthony Romero and Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld

June 17, 2009 | Torture is a crime and the United States engaged in it. Those are two indisputable facts. Given the mountains of evidence already in the public domain, any effort to deny or soften that harsh and devastating reality is either disingenuous, uninformed or a result of the human instinct to avoid painful truths. But one of the things that allows our democracy to endure is that time after time, no matter the misdeed, we have been willing to look ourselves in the mirror, acknowledge our wrongdoing and hold ourselves accountable.

Both of the authors of this piece chose professions devoted to protecting democratic principles, human rights and the rule of law. One of us is an Army prosecutor who resigned from six pending Guantánamo cases due to ethical failings of the tribunal system, and the other is the leader of the premier civil liberties organization in the U.S. We both understand that the process of self-examination and accountability has been, and remains, the only way to move forward and regain our moral and legal grounding.

To date, the evidence that U.S. officials engaged in widespread and systemic torture and abuse of detainees with the authorization of the highest Bush administration officials comes from a wide range of sources. There are congressional reports, journalistic investigations, detainees’ own accounts, and even -- astonishingly -- boastful admissions by some of the highest officials of the Bush administration, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been aggressively forthright in his defense of torture methods including waterboarding. An ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has also produced more than 100,000 pages of revealing government documents, including the now well-known Justice Department memos laying out the legal framework for the Bush administration’s torture policies. And despite President Obama’s unfortunate decision to reverse his administration’s earlier intention to order their release, we know there are thousands of photographs depicting detainee abuse in overseas prisons beyond Abu Ghraib. While likely to be disturbing -- as they should be -- these images of human brutality would serve to confirm the pervasive and orchestrated nature of these crimes.

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This cannot be the way forward in a country committed to the rule of law that applies to everyone, regardless of status or position. We have a Department of Justice for a reason, and now it’s up to Attorney General Holder, the nation’s top law enforcement officer, to do his job and appoint an independent prosecutor to follow the evidence where it may lead. In this country, we investigate crimes and, when appropriate, we prosecute them. Once we start compromising our principles and laws because it is too messy, too inconvenient or even too painful to enforce them, we render them meaningless. This is not a political issue, but a moral and legal one.

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[chascarrillo]

1. Forget it.

The DoJ only enforces the laws they agree with. For example, laws that deny people their civil rights.

Same old fucking shit.

[katandmoon]

2. It'll have to wait for the next president. This one is above it all.