My Letter to AG Holder

Attorney General Holder,

I am pleased to read that you are considering appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the activities of the Bush Administration--particularly in regard to torture. I am, however, amazed that there is anything still to be considered; the information already in the public domain--including numerous, public, recorded admissions by Bush, Cheney, and others--clearly indicts these individuals of serious criminal wrongdoing including war crimes. Our laws and treaty obligations require that you investigate these matters. Every day that goes by further implicates you, the Department of Justice, the Obama Administration, and Congress in complicity in these crimes.

We, The People, have been waiting for you to fulfill your obligation in this matter. We have grown weary of waiting and are losing confidence that any shred remains intact of the constitutional democracy so carefully crafted by our nation's founders.

It has been reported that you remarked not so long ago that our nation would be proud of our government again. I urge you to begin to make it so.

Holder May Probe Torture

This Newsweek article (release today from the pending July 20 publication) proclaims in its subheading, “Obama doesn't want to look back, but Attorney General Eric Holder may probe Bush-era torture anyway.” In the article the author, Daniel Klaidman, says, “For a new administration to reach back and investigate its predecessor is rare, if not unprecedented.” When compared with the “unprecedented” lawlessness which was the hallmark of the Bush Administration, that ridiculous excuse holds no water.

On the release of the “torture memos,” Klaidman writes:

Holder and his team celebrated quietly, and waited for national outrage to build. But they'd miscalculated. The memos had already received such public notoriety that the new details in them did not shock many people. (Even the revelation, a few days later, that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another detainee had been waterboarded hundreds of times did not drastically alter the contours of the story.)

It is truly dishonest to make such a claim when the mainstream media—in the few instances in which the memos were mentioned at all—uniformly derailed the debate by using highly political (in MSM terms, “non-judgmental”) terminology to frame the issue (e.g. “enhanced interrogation techniques” and methods “which some call torture”) and quickly changed the debate to “did it work?” This was immediately followed by the obscene Cheney Torture Media Tour in which the former Vice Torturer repeatedly claimed that these “techniques” had “saved thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of lives.” A few public statements by President Obama and Attorney General Holder would have gone a long way toward refocusing the conversation.

If AG Holder hasn’t yet heard the voices of outrage, let’s help him out. He can be contacted at:

Office of the Attorney General
Phone: 202-514-2001
Email: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
Fax:202-307-6777

Torture Must Be Punished

This article by Susan Goering appearing in today's Baltimore Sun is a must read. This excerpt very succinctly counters those who decry "looking back" as political:

The effect of these remedial steps [investigations and prosecutions] would not be, as some have suggested, to criminalize politics. On the contrary, to attempt to "move on" while standing on a foundation of unacknowledged criminality would be to politicize criminal conduct.

Fuzzy the Conciliation Caterpillar by Mark Fiore

This is a great animated cartoon at SFGate.com which shows how ludicrous the "I want to look forward, not backward" mantra is.