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Why is Obama protecting lawbreakers?

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
Weren't you Obama voters promised transparency? Wasn't a big part of the campaign based on whether Bush and his cronies broke international law and made the US look bad? Why is Obama protecting those very people he demonized in his campaign?

Cheney Lives On (libtard Obama-media says patriotic dissent 'undemocratic')
Salon.com ^ | Thursday May 14, 2009 06:38 EDT | Joan Walsh

Posted on Thursday, May 14, 2009 6:41:03 PM by lewisglad

Imagine if Republicans thought it was important to try to extend a hand to a new president who is leading the country through one of its worst crises in history. I'm not normally one to invoke "tradition," but the tradition of administrations not criticizing their successors for a decent interval actually supports democracy and the orderly transfer of power. Cheney's refusal to go away is un-democratic.

For the first time in his presidency, I had the sick feeling that Obama was lying in his remarks on the photos, once when he said the new images "are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib" -- I simply don't believe that -- and again when he insisted "the individuals who were involved have been identified, and appropriate actions have been taken."

That is a flat-out lie. Out of eight prosecutions, mostly of so-called bad apples, only reservist Charles Graner sits in prison today, while the architects who "Gitmo-ized" Abu Ghraib and encouraged torture all went free.

I might have been mollified if, along with his decision on the photos, Obama had announced that Attorney General Eric Holder would appoint a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of who authorized and carried out torture, and to prosecute them as the law requires. But I think Obama's cave-in on the photos makes that less likely rather than more.

I could laugh at Cheney if I thought his worldview had been defeated; too much of it lives on, as Obama breaks another campaign promise and sides with the architects of the surveillance state. He's flip-flopped on FISA and the photos and other issues in between, and they've all had one thing in common: His decisions ultimately protect those who broke the law to spy and torture
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Anonymous

Guest
From watching the hearings that is what it sounds like the Dems are calling for- an investigation- and if criminal acts are found, prosecution of those involved in authorizing it....

And its the Repubs that are stonewalling- and are trying to make every excuse in the book to avoid prosecuting any lawbreakers....

If they were so interested in finding the facts- and enforcing the law- why was Sen. Graham the only Repub on the committee that showed up for it :???:


Another witness, Philip D. Zelikow, who was a legal advisor to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, provided new details about what he said were his efforts to aggressively protest the use of the techniques in meetings in the White House situation room and elsewhere.

In each case, he said, he was routinely blocked by more senior administration officials and ordered to destroy a lengthy legal memo in which he outlined his concerns about the "unsound, even unreasonable" legal justifications for the tactics.

Zelikow, now a history professor at the University of Virginia, called the interrogation campaign "an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment to extract information." It was, he added, "a mistake, perhaps a disastrous one" that should be investigated so the country can learn from it.

Other witnesses at the hearing also called for such an inquiry, as did several Democratic senators led by Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the subcommittee chairman and a former top federal prosecutor.

Whitehouse vowed more hearings on the legality of the interrogations, in tandem with the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating whether the techniques worked and how they were used.

Whitehouse said mounting evidence suggests that administration officials used twisted legal interpretations to authorize the tactics. He also said he was concerned about information provided by Zelikow and others, suggesting that administration officials beat back internal opposition that was much stronger than has been disclosed.

"We were told that waterboarding was determined to be legal but were not told how badly the law was ignored, bastardized and manipulated by the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel; nor were we told how furiously government and military lawyers rejected the defective OLC opinions," Whitehouse said.

He said that, as a member of both the judiciary and intelligence committees, he intended to investigate the role played by private CIA contractors in the interrogations.

"We were told we couldn't second-guess the brave CIA officers who did this, and now we hear that the program was led by private contractors with a profit motive and no real interrogation experience," Whitehouse said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a lawyer in the Air Force Reserve, challenged Soufan and other witnesses to prove that the coercive interrogation techniques did not provide important information about Al Qaeda.

He suggested that hearings on the tactics and their legal foundations were "a political stunt" by the Democrats, and that their efforts to gather details of the classified program would dangerously undermine national security.

Some administration officials "made mistakes out of fear," and the government should learn from those mistakes but not prosecute or even investigate anyone for their role in them, Graham said.
 
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