Try as they will, Conservatives have not really been able to make a good argument that Obama, by moving away from the failed foreign policies of the Bush Administration, has in reality made America less safe. Instead they have responded with a series of knee jerk reactions aimed at the obstruction and rejection of anything and everything that Obama has either done or proposed. Conservatives have fallen back on the now hackneyed idea that they alone are the ones who can keep America safe and that the Democrats in general and liberals in particular will, or deliberately want to, weaken America. In his last book "A Time to Fight" James Webb, decorated Vietnam veteran; former Reagan era SECNAV; Republican turned Democrat; and now Senator from Virginia, devoted an entire chapter to explaining how such an argument by Republicans was no longer tenable or one that they can legitimately promote. Obama has in reality kept in place much of the prior Administration's policies and procedures that are embodied in the Patriot Act, the wiretapping law and the continued operation of Guantanamo. To date the Obama Administration has recaptured an American merchant ship from Somali Pirates and, in concert with federal and local authorities, uncovered a possible terror ring based in New York and Denver.
Anyone who has followed closely the events surrounding the War in Iraq knows that it is not, and was not, the central front in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Rather, it is the trans Afghanistan-Pakistan border where the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are and it is here that they continue to operate putting together attacks on London, Madrid, etc. It is from this region that they continue to attack our troops in Afghanistan and beyond that have destabilized large parts of Pakistan. Thus the point has already been proven. The central front in the G.W.O.T. is where the enemy is and not where Bush, Cheney, Coulter, Limbaugh, Malkin, O'Reilly or any other Conservative defines it to be. The ironic thing is that Bush's invasion of Afghanistan was the only brilliant move of his eight years in office. He then went on to drop the ball by invading Iraq and leaving the enemy alone, allowing Al Qaeda to regroup and become as dangerous as they were on 9/10/01. There have been volumes written to the point that the invasion of Iraq did nothing to make America safer. The conclusion of the 9/11 Commission Report states that Iraq had played no part in the attacks of 9/11 and Bush himself would later admit so publicly and on national television. Seeing as it is generally agreed that Iraq was never a factor in the 9/11 attacks, and that Al Qaeda remains open for business on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, there is not much more to say in disproving Conservative claims that the actions of the present Administration, as currently carried out in Iraq, will necessarily jeopardize American security interests. If America is attacked by a resurgent Al Qaeda would that be the fault of the Obama Administration or a result of George Bush's failure to consolidate his initial victory in Afghanistan? Had we spent 800 billion dollars in Afghanistan instead of Iraq what threat if any would we now face? While it is true that Obama has taken ownership of the trans AFPAK conflict, its also true that he inherited from the Bush Administration a set of circumstances there, which are fraught with difficult and dangerous choices, none of which are clear-cut or that guarantee American success.
Many Conservatives will go to the grave insisting that invading Iraq was the right thing to do because they fail to see that their ideas as to what makes America either safe or a great nation may not in fact be always and everywhere valid. There are those on the right who continue to try to make the case that we could have eventually won in Vietnam because we never lost a major combat action against the Communists. They will insist on this very narrow historical fact while at the same time being blind to, or ignoring the reality that Communism in Indochina, at that time, was a vehicle for the achievement of nationalist aims. In their myopic focus on combat capabilities they will continue to ignore the fact that successive South Vietnamese governments were too corrupt to act as a foundation for democracy. They will insist that "American Exceptionalism" would triumph over a people that first took up arms against a foreign invader a thousand years before William the Conqueror left Normandy to invade England in 1066.
If America is attacked again, it won't automatically be the fault of the Barack Obama. What if the attacker was motivated to strike because of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or the loss of a family member during the occupation of Iraq? What if that attacker was moved to action as a result of the policies of the Bush Administration rather than Barack Obama's decision to reduce troop levels in Iraq? Would that attack be attributed to the current administration or the last? Conservatives have made a big deal about saying that during the Bush years we were not attacked again, but as Richard Wolfe of Newsweek pointed out, terror attacks skyrocketed worldwide after we invaded Iraq. What about those American service personnel that were killed or wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan at the hands of those motivated to action by the invasion of Iraq, don't they count as Americans that have been attacked? More to the point, this country was attacked when the Republicans controlled the Presidency, Congress, and the majority of statehouses. As David Sanger points out in his latest book, "The Inheritance": "The plan for dealing with al Qaeda had been sitting on Condoleezza Rice's desk on the morning of September 11, waiting for discussion." In the final analysis it is almost impossible for Conservatives to make the argument that their policies have made us safer seeing as, according to the Center for International and Strategic Studies, the number of people recruited into Islamic terror organizations soared exponentially after the invasion of Iraq thereby dramatically increasing the number of our potential enemies. Conservatives like Ann Coulter would claim that Bush created "a flytrap for Islamic crazies in Iraq", whereby they could be dispatched with by American forces. It would be more accurate to say that we created a trap of our own within which our troops were needlessly put in harms way for the sake of some misconceived NeoConservative pipe dream. Is it cheaper for a radicalized Muslim to scrape together the cost of a one way ticket to the United States, procure a passport and visa and then forage about this country in search of a terror cell or is it economically and in practical terms more effective to come up with bus fare to Syria and then walk across the border and join in an ongoing insurgency where one could even be paid to carry out attacks against Americans?
We were susceptible to an attack on 9/11 because, among other things, we never thought this sort of thing could happen. We became infinitely safer just by paying attention to security threats thereafter. If we get hit again it may very well be the case that we did so because we did not take the time and spend the money to "harden" critical strategic components of our infrastructure like rail systems, water and power supplies, ports and most importantly chemical plants. Have the failed policies of the Bush era created an opportunity for someone radicalized and now prone to action as a result of those policies to actually carry out an attack on America? If, in the words of Homeland Security expert Stephen Flynn, had we spent billions on infrastructure defense instead of wasting those resources in the Iraq misadventure, we would be infinitely safer. Who then would we legitimately blame for another attack on America, Barack Obama or George Bush and the NeoConservative claque that led us into the Iraq misadventure in the first place?
More and more former interrogators and counterinsurgency experts are using Dick Cheney's recent ubiquity to expose his iniquity regarding the torture and abuse of detainees. Earlier this week, I wrote about Major Matthew Alexander, the former Senior Interrogator who conducted over 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised 1,000 more. Alexander relied upon conventional means of interrogation, and his efforts led to the capture and killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. Yet Alexander also witnessed the perilous consequences of Cheney's torture policy.
In an exclusive interview with Brave New Foundation, Alexander said, "At the prison where I conducted interrogations, we heard day in and day out foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib."
Today, MoveOn.org and VoteVets.org joined the growing movement to amplify the testimonies of former interrogators and reveal the repercussions of treating prisoners inhumanely. Their joint campaign features a video with Jay Bagwell, an Afghanistan veteran and counterintelligence agent, who reaffirmed Alexander's assessment of Cheney's torture policy. According to Bagwell, "Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It's used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo."
Let's debunk Dick Cheney's pernicious lies about torture once and for all. Let's look past the mainstream media frenzy over the personal feud between Obama and Cheney, past the ludicrous GOP talking points, and instead focus on a real story that could allow us to hold Cheney accountable. Major Matthew Alexander is a former Senior Interrogator who conducted more than 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised over 1,000 more, including that of al Qaeda-in-Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- and he did so using traditional methods. In an exclusive interview released today by Brave New Foundation, Alexander said Dick Cheney's torture policy "literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives."
According to Alexander, the torture and abuse conducted at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay became the number one recruiting tool for foreign fighters and suicide bombers who attacked coalition forces in Iraq. Huffington Post's Ryan Grim highlights the importance of Alexander's testimony:
Alexander easily takes down Cheney's arguments. The most immediate blow Alexander strikes is, of course, his obvious success, which undercuts Cheney's case for more brutal techniques. Alexander also engages on the level of principle. For Cheney, the suggestion that torture is a poor strategy because it aids terrorist recruitment is nothing more than old-fashioned blame-America-first cowardice.
As I sit here on May 25, 2009 and reflect on the meaning of this day, just as I do quietly and privately on every Memorial Day, I remember the service and sacrifice of those who went before me, including my own family's not insignificant contributions in both World Wars and in Korea. Compared to them, my own twenty years of service as a reservist seems insignificant if not trivial. Nonetheless on a day like today, I can't but help being galled by the recent "road show" undertaken by the former Vice President Dick Cheney with its theatrical, if not alarmist claim, that the current administration has undermined the security of the United States. Mr. Cheney has suggested that Barack Obama would set the country on a course where other Americans will once again find themselves in harms way. I find this political grandstanding nothing less than preposterous, when one stops to consider that it is coming from a man, who when it was his time to serve his country in Vietnam, opted out as he had, in his own words, "other priorities". In his pursuit of "other priorities", Dick Cheney would benefit from multiple deferments from military service while other Americans were fighting and dying in Southeast Asia. Cheney's assertion that Obama has embarked on a "reckless" course of action in seeking to close Guantanamo should be seen as a rather curious statement when one considers that it was Cheney and his Neocon fellow travelers who advocated for a war with Iraq, on the most dubious grounds, thereby engineering the most reckless undertaking in American history.
I can give the Bush Administration a pass for operating beyond the pale of accepted rules of engagement in the period immediately after the September 11 attacks owing to the gravity of the situation and the unknowable state of national security which resulted from those attacks. I can also understand how American intelligence officers at that time, in an effort to forestall another attack, could chose to employ interrogation techniques that can only be categorized as torture. That said, as time passed and the threat environment was revealed to be far less dangerous than had been anticipated the justification for torture and detainment without due process became harder to justify. It is impossible to deny that the existence of the Guantanamo facility along with the abuses at Abu Ghraib would become key factors in the recruitment of new adherents to the radical Muslim jihad and thereby create new and more multifaceted threats to be addressed.
In an address to American troops in Europe during World War II, General George S. Patton would state:" You don't win wars by dying for your country, you win wars by getting the other guy to die for his." The corollary line of logic to Patton's advice for our time is that you don't win wars by creating new enemies. At this point in time it is a forgone conclusion that the existence of Guantanamo works against our national security interests, as it is the single best recruitment tool presently available to Al Qaeda, thereby contributing to the pool of available enemy combatants. For those who have taken the time to listen to the debate, there is bi-partisan agreement on this fact as evidenced by the recent comments of Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) along with the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, all of whom have agreed that Guantanamo needs to be closed. The crux of the argument revolves around how to relocate the detainees so as not to compromise our security.
With general agreement on the need to deal with the Guantanamo detainees in some other fashion, what then is the motive behind the Cheney "road show" other than the former Vice Presidents seeming need to redeem himself in the eyes of the American public? As has been speculated by the talking classes, Cheney is still smarting from the fact that he and his Neocon clique were marginalized and took a back seat to Condoleezza Rice and the State Department after the 2004 election. Why is it that Cheney just can't accept that his version of national security may be inapplicable at this point in time or that it is perhaps, less than well founded given the current threat environment? After all, for all of the claims that Bush and Cheney prevented another attack on U.S. soil, the fact of the matter is that this country suffered it's worst terrorist attack on their watch. In reality Dick Cheney, with his advocating for War in Iraq and his championing of "enhanced interrogation" and unlimited detention may have done more to endanger the security of the country than Obama ever could by closing down Guantanamo. What will Mr. Cheney have to say if individuals who carry out the next terror attack on the United States admit to interrogators that their motive for joining the jihad was the invasion of Iraq, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, or the existence of Guantanamo?
Over the last two days, so many different revelations have exposed aspects of the role torture played in attempts to tie Iraq to al Qaeda, thus justifying the Iraq War, that there is no longer any reasonable doubt about the intention involved. This is why we tortured. Not the only reason, to be sure, but a very important one--and one not even covered by the farcical "torture memos". Rachel Maddow provided a very compelling summary of the evidence last night, before discussing the latest developments with Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side:
In light of these latest developments, Obama's attempt to continue covering up Bush Era crimes is no longer tenable. His promises of "openness and transparency" cannot be squared with covering up what clearly are high crimes and misdemeanors. Torture is against the law, it's against international law, so is making war on another country. So we have two grave crimes linked to one another. Failing to investigate and prosecute torture is itself a violation of our treaty obligations--another violation of international law, and hence a violation of our own Constitution, which declares such treaties to be the "law of the land."
There is no doubt about it. America is a rouge state. Bush made it so, and under Obama's failure to take corrective action, it remains so. We have only barely begun the struggle to reclaim our democracy, and our republican form of government. We have no more than a toehold, a foothold at best. The promise of "change we can believe in" has become the single greatest obstacle to actually delivering change we can believe in. We cannot move forward without understanding our past, and how we have gotten where we are today. A democratic republic cannot be built on silences and lies.
We have been told repeatedly that concern for the truth will get in the way of Obama's important agenda. But everything Obama wants to do is already a compromise, and its being compromised further and further every day. The idea that surrendering in advance on the most basic responsibilities of upholding the rule of law will somehow make Obama politically stronger and more able to solve other important problems that confront the nation is palpably false. Bill Clinton tried a similar trade-off when he took office, and it ended up empowering the GOP as it had not been empowered since the 1920s. Retreat from responsibility is not the way forward. It is not now. It cannot ever be.
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are those who want crops without plowing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -- Frederick Douglass
One of my students, Farhan Daredia, now edits a legal news site called Main Justice with former WSJ/Salon reporter Mary Jacoby -- where he posted some interesting analysis about how Dick Cheney got screwed by Bush-Cheney anti-transparency policies:
The CIA on Thursday denied former Vice President Dick Cheney’s March 31 request to the National Archives and Records Administration for classified intelligence documents regarding the effectiveness and necessity of torture. Why? Because of an executive order made by President George W. Bush intended to complicate and overrule the Mandatory Declassification Review process. Oops.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton filed Executive Order 12958, an order intended to make the government more transparent...But Clinton was overruled by Executive Order 13292, signed by President George W. Bush on March 25, 2003. It amended the Clinton executive order, giving the Vice President essentially the same authority as the President in the classification process, and adding a number of exemptions to reject declassification requests:
What’s the conflicting litigation holding Cheney up? According to the letter rejecting Cheney’s request:
we have discovered that it is currently the subject of pending FOIA litigation (Bloche v. Department of Defense, Amnesty International v. Central Intelligence Agency).
...So, long story short, the documents Cheney wants declassified cannot be declassified because there is already a FOIA request to have the documents declassified, now that sounds like good old-fashioned Bush administration logic!
Let me start with the obvious, that yes, if Pelosi knew there were war crimes being committed by the administration, and failed to try to stop it, even at risk of prison time for violating secrecy laws, then that deserves condemnation, loss of her Speaker's gavel and perhaps even prosecution. I certainly think her and the other members of Congress who were at all briefed on these activities should be part of any investigation that takes place. That said, let's not get carried away and equate people who merely know about a crime, and those who actively plan and execute that crime. Morally there is a significant difference there.
However her predicament highlights a lesser feature of multiple Bush Administration intelligence scandals that needs more attention: Bush's penchant for only having the Gang-Of-Eight briefed, rather than the full Intelligence Committees of the House and Senate. This decision was quite deliberate, and legally it is highly consequential in so far as it eviscerates Congress' ability to conduct meaningful oversight or legislative check on the Executive branch.
200 Organizations Ask Holder to Appoint a Special Prosecutor for Bush, Cheney, et alia
Two hundred organizations, including After Downing Street, Democrats.com, the Robert Jackson Steering Committee, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, the Society of American Law Teachers, Human Rights USA, the American Freedom Campaign, and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, have signed a joint statement urging Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor for former top officials of the Bush Administration.
#1: Cheney says that he and Bush ordered torture but did nothing wrong.
On Sunday, Cheney said: "The fact of the matter is that these [torture] techniques that we're talking about are used on our own people. In the SERE program that in effect trains our people with respect to capture and evasion and so forth, and escape, a lot of them go through these same exact procedures."
If this were true, participants in the SERE program would be kidnapped and tortured by people willing to kill them. They would be waterboarded believing they might be drowned. This would be done upwards of 100 times. They would be hung by their wrists, beaten, electroshocked, deprived of sleep, stripped naked and exposed to cold, attacked by dogs, slammed against walls, kept in isolation, and in many cases killed, in many other cases driven insane.
Soon after the Obama Administration released documents which showed that the CIA had used waterboarding hundreds of times on two high level Al Qaeda detainees, I received a phone call from former FBI Special Agent Joe Navarro.
Banned Techniques Yielded 'High Value Information,' Memo Says
Torture works! Who knew?
The source of this garbage is Admiral Dennis Blair, who is deeply committed to giving everybody who tortured detainees a free pass.
"I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past," he wrote, "but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given."
So it isn't exactly big news that this guy would claim his top-secret records prove that torture really works, and we're all so much safer because a few raggedy Arabs were (half) drowned, frozen, humiliated, beaten, kicked, suffocated, sleep-deprived, isolated, chained up like pretzels for days at a time and forced to poop and pee all over themselves, while their families were arrested, threatened, tortured, deported, and dispossessed.
I am a discontent and distressed taxpayer! "Disgruntled" is a word that might describe my deep dissatisfaction with how my tax dollars are spent. Yet, on April 15, 2009, typically thought of as "Tax Day," I felt no need to join my fellow citizens in protest. I did not attend a "Tea Party". I too believe, in this country, "taxation without representation" is a problem. One only need ponder the profits of lobbyists to understand the premise. Corporate supplicants amass a 22,000 percent rate of return on their investments. The average American is happy to realize a two-digit increase. Nonetheless, as much as I too may argue the point, assessments are paid without accountability, what concerns me more is my duty dollars did not support what I think ethical projects.
They call for fiscal discipline after driving our debt through the roof.
They refuse to concede Al Franken's victory five months post-election after originally calling on Franken to concede a few days post-election (and after calling for Al Gore to put country first and concede early in 2000).
Dick Cheney says President Obama is making us weaker. And you KNOW that if anything tragic happened to Capt. Richard Phillips, Republicans would say, "Obama can't even defeat a couple pirates on a lifeboat, how will he keep us safe from terrorists?"
President Barack Obama twice authorized the military to rescue a U.S. captain who was being held by Somali pirates and whose life appeared to be at risk, administration officials said after Sunday’s rescue.
The Defense Department twice asked Obama for permission to use military force to rescue Capt. Richard Phillips from a lifeboat off the Somali coast. Obama first gave permission around 8 p.m. Friday, and upgraded it at 9:20 a.m. Saturday. Officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations said the second order was to encompass more military personnel and equipment that arrived in the Indian Ocean to engage the pirates.
But 11 days into the stand-off, the US said in a letter to China it was “very sorry” for the loss of a Chinese fighter pilot in a collision with a US spy plane, and for the US aircraft’s entering Chinese airspace without permission.
Good point, Oliver. Republicans love to project strength on military affairs, but time and time again they prove to be quite bad at the whole military thing. Republicans are kind of the Bad News Bears, but with missiles.
Especially as Republicans launch attacks on Obama and Bob Gates for re-prioritizing spending within the Defense Department and making initial attempts to combat the inefficiencies of the military-industrial complex, it would be good to get other examples of Republican incompetence on military affairs out on the table.
If you have some, please share below (with links, preferably).
Matthew Yglesias says of Dick Cheney "I’d be laying low thanking my lucky stars that I’m not on trial for war crimes not going on television to talk smack." Nevertheless, here he is:
Now, why is he callng attention to himself and bad things done during his administration? Inside for that.
She said it! I never thought this day would come. Change has truly arrived in America, even before the Presidential Inauguration. Today, on Fox News, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, the only person who could, the woman who for so long would not, stated, she is Open to the Prosecution of Bush Administration Officials. Oh joy! Oh, bliss. Never did I imagine this moment might become a reality. Even the idea that this could be a possibility eluded me. Today, on January 18, 2009, finally, I have hope. I believe in the future, as Michelle Obama expressed, "For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country, or I will be when I see an actionable censure.
First let me say that we want Eric Holder confirmed as Attorney General. We want him confirmed because of statements like this...
Washington, D.C. -- Eric H. Holder Jr., Deputy Attorney General during the Clinton administration, asserted in a speech to the American Constitution Society (ACS) that the United States must reverse "the disastrous course" set by the Bush administration in the struggle against terrorism by closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, declaring without qualification that the U.S. does not torture people, ending the practice of transferring individuals involuntarily to countries that engage in torture and ceasing warrantless domestic surveillance.
"Our needlessly abusive and unlawful practices in the 'War on Terror' have diminished our standing in the world community and made us less, rather than more, safe," Holder told a packed room at the ACS 2008 Convention on Friday evening. "For the sake of our safety and security, and because it is the right thing to do, the next president must move immediately to reclaim America's standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights."
We want the man who said those words to be our next Attorney General. Because in truth and in a logical world the best way, perhaps the only way, to "reclaim America's standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights".....is to investigate and then prosecute those who have criminally destroyed that standing. They destroyed it by using torture.
In the fall of 2001 I picked up a penny and since that time we have not had a major terrorist attack in the United States. My magic penny is the reason. I know this because I did not have the magic penny on Sept. 11, 2001 and that was a very bad day. But since then we have been safe so the most logical conclusion is my magic penny.
My magic penny also wards off Weapons of Mass Destruction. We have not been hit by WMD since I found my special penny. The penny is so powerful, in fact, it makes it hard to even find WMD which we know must be around. I'm not sure exactly how it works but I think my magic penny scares the crap out of those who would harm us and gets them to rat out their friends.
The last time I had a magic penny was the period from spring of 1993 to the summer of 2001 when I lost it. That penny had specific powers, it protected the World Trade Center. Too bad I lost it. My bad.
But fortunately I have a new magic penny. And it's hard at work keeping us safe. Hopefully, if my magic penny ever wears out, it will first teach a new magic penny to keep us safe.
It is now acceptable to go on national TV and argue openly for the use of torture as formal US bi-partisan consensus policy.
I went looking to see what I could find in terms of prominent media figures defending the use of torture, and here's what I found.
Most egregious is radio host and (non-practising, I hope) attorney Michael Smerconish who is a regular contributer to Hardball. Here he is in December of 2008:
Don't expect me to or even ask me to tell you why you should sign the petition.
You already know why you should sign the petition. You don't need me or anyone else to tell you why you should sign the petition.
Click the Badge to read and sign the Formal Petition to Attorney General-Designate Eric Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor to investigate and prosecute any and all government officials who have participated in War Crimes.
Click "Get Badge" to get the html code and post the badge on your blog or website so other people can find and sign the petition too.
There is no more debate on these matters. The only people who want to continue debating these matters are war criminals who want to be let off the hook and supporters of letting war criminals off the hook.
Signing the petition drafted by budhydharma and Docudharma is not in defiance of our President-Elect Obama, but rather a sign of support for the difficult times that he and Holder will face when performing their clear constitutional duties.
As President, Obama will have the constitutional duty to faithfully execute our laws.
The constitutional oath of office will require President Obama to faithfully execute the office of President and preserve, protect and defend our Constitution. Our constitution also requires that our presidents "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." The principle of the rule of law is partially based on this Faithfully Execute clause which requires our President to comply with laws, our Constitution and treaties because our Constitution established a government of laws, not of men and women.
The Geneva Convention is one of the laws which must be faithfully executed.
Our constitution mandates that treaties are one of the laws that the President must faithfully execute. Moreover, treaties are recognized as one of our supreme laws of the land alongside our Constitution and federal laws. For over 200 years, the federal courts have reaffirmed that our President is bound by the laws of war, which include conventions. In fact, both Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006)addressed issues of whether the US government was violating the terms of the 1949 Geneva Convention. Yet, some will whine that it is partisan to not exempt Bush from 200 years of precedent that governed presidents from both parties.
The Geneva Convention imposes a duty to prosecute former presidents who committed war crimes.
You already have your own reasons why you should sign the petition.
All the reasons that built up, piled one on top of the other for that past eight years as these criminals hijacked the country, dismantled the constitution and the rule of law, made their criminal friends fabulously wealthy, were directly responsible for the deaths of more than a million Iraqis in an illegal and immoral invasion and occupation, destroyed the global economy, wrecked America's reputation around the world, and called you a traitor when you cried foul and set up schemes to spy on you and intimidate you into silence.
And tortured people in your name. Tortured people. In your name. Tortured people with the blackest, most heinous and most evil torture methods known to humanity. Tortured people with methods that America has pressed war criminal charges against other countries citizens for using. Tortured people with the most sadistic and evil methods the Spanish Inquisition and more recently the Khmer Rouge made a regular habit of using as an oppression tool. Tortured people with methods that have been universally condemned and outlawed by virtually every country and society on earth.
You already know. You already know all of your own reasons why you should sign the petition.
Barack Obama will host Dick Cheney on Tuesday in Chicago for talks on subjects the President-elect's transition team would not reveal but sources say include covert Bush Administration policies Cheney would like to see continued.
The Obama-Cheney meeting will come on the heels of an Obama-McCain detente on Monday. Sources say Obama and McCain will discuss issues the two can work together on during the upcoming Obama administration.
Last week Obama met with Senator Hillary Clinton about her possible appointment as Secretary of State. These meetings with former rivals underscore the approach Obama will take and the influence of his idol Abraham Lincoln. Obama has frequently mentioned Doris Kearns Goodwin's book about Lincoln, "Team of Rivals," as a template for his administration.
In regards to the meeting with the Vice President, one advisor has leaked this surprise news: Cheney is under consideration for a proposed new cabinet position, Secretary of Defense Against the Dark Arts. This is a possibility the progressive netroots should oppose. While Cheney certainly knows as much about the dark arts as anyone, how can we be certain his fraternization with Dementors and Death Eaters will cease in two months?
In the fall of 2001 I picked up a penny and since that time we have not had a major terrorist attack in the United States. My magic penny is the reason. I know this because I did not have the magic penny on Sept. 11, 2001 and that was a very bad day. But since then we have been safe so the most logical conclusion is my magic penny.
There is no more debate on these matters. The only people who want to continue debating these matters are war criminals who want to be let off the hook and supporters of letting war criminals off the hook.
