Obama's tortured response to US government sanctioned torture

It is quite remarkable. The Attorney General of former US Pres Bush issued Memo after Memo explaining to the CIA and its operatives that certain kinds of torture of potentially (or really) militant Muslims is acceptable. Health care professionals pro-actively participated in torture based interrogations of such prisoners. All of this was in clear violation of international law on this matter.

Obama, yes, the 'bollocks we can believe in' guy who's now US President, has taken the brave step of publishing these Memos. Now the world knows in detail what kinds of torture US operatives deployed in order to extract useful information from prisoners. That's the good thing. The Memos in question reveal quite remarkable stuff, including sleep deprivation (several days), slamming prisoners' heads against concrete walls, the now notorious waterboarding, loud music, sensory deprivation, keeping prisoners for days in a row naked, and the list goes on. Health care professionals monitored the proceedings and the prisoners' health. The bad thing, much in line with Obama talking the talk but as yet not walking the walk, is that his administration has no intention of prosecuting those involved in torturing inmates, or those who authorised and / or ordered such activities.

To be clear, this will permit the following to get away with torture scotch-free:
a) those who already argue that they were following orders, and who claim that they received legal advice from the Bush administration's Attorney General suggestiong that the torture wasn't torture and so they could (disingeniously) claim to be not in breach of any international law; and
b) those who actually rendered the misleading legal advice; and
c) those who issued the rules authorising torture.

It seems to me that certainly the former Attorney General as well as other senior officials of the Bush administration ought to be held accountable for their actions. This view seems supported by international law. The USA is bound by the UN Convention against Torture, and so is obliged to prosecute anyone against whom clear evidence exists. It is unclear to me why Obama chose not to hold them accountable. One wonders whether he is already oncerned about the question of whether he and his government mates could be prosecuted for their potential future illegal activities... - Surely, if the illegal act of committing, ordering or authorising torture is insufficient to trigger prosecutions under the Obama administration, one wonders what would be worthy of its attention. It seems as if for reasons of cheap political expedience justice related considerations were sacrificed by the man you should not believe in.

Another sign of spinelessness - or a sign of more to come from Obama?

Buch's administration responsible for policies that led to torture of detainees

This needs no further comment!

AP by Joby Warrick

WASHINGTON - A bipartisan Senate report released today says that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charges that decisions by those officials led to serious offenses against prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.

The Senate Armed Services Committee report accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the principal architects of the plan to use harsh interrogation techniques on captured fighters and terrorism suspects, rejecting the Bush administration's contention that the policies originated lower down the command chain.

"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the panel concludes. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."

The report, released by Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz., and based on a nearly two-year investigation, said that both the policies and resulting controversies tarnished the reputation of the United States and undermined national security. "Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority," it said.

"Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right," wrote Petraeus, who at the time was the top U.S. commander in Iraq. "Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy."

The US and Global Warming

I thought, by way of celebrating yesterday's US Supreme Court Judgement which declared that the US Presidency was seriously deficient in its policy response on global warming and environmental protection issues, a spoof video featuring George W Bush on global warming and other issues- enjoy (or don't).