- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
The idea of launching a totally new "solution" by formulating and creating Truth Commissions sounds about as legal and desirable as coming up with a totally new "solution" for terrorists by formulating and creating Military Commissions.
The international law is quite clear. If this country feels it cannot prosecute, it is to give the cases over to a neutral country or to the Hague for prosecution. A Truth Commission, especially one which immunizes the perpetrators in exchange for their information, is just another version of a cover-up. This isn't a political matter, and it isn't just a matter for which only the U.S. has juridiction. Torture is required to be investigated, prosecuted, and punished, and if the U.S. doesn't do it, then any other country that signed the same international treaties we did can do so.
This is just another indication that Obama and those who surround him are as capable of taking liberties with the law as the people currently in office. I don't find improvised the law any more comforting in the name of national unity than I did in the name of national security.
Obama has a choice: prosecute or hand the cases over to another sovereign state or to the Hague for prosecution. I'm real sorry he doesn't want to mar the bright shiny paint job on his presidency with the muck of real world issues, but that's life. Maybe he should run for student council if he wants a job that keeps the paint shiny.
From what I've seen about his attitude on this in Mark Benjamin's article and elsewhere, I have zero confidence at this point that the torture will even stop, or that all those tens of thousands of prisoners under U.S. control will see human rights at all. I see no indication of the wider goal of bringing the U.S. home again on international humanitarian law or international human rights law, I see less than zero hope that the U.S. will ever, ever again believe that the rights of an average person in a land far from our shores, or even the very existence of such a person, is something that an overfed, comfortable American should ever care about. I don't see Barack Obama as a message of hope, I see him as lacking the experience and the core values to do the right thing. His campaign and related Democrats email me more than once a day, and snail mail me at least once a week. These days they get only one response: No. I'm not supporting another guy who doesn't give a damn about right and wrong. Inspiring speeches don't make up for moral decrepitude.
