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Saturday, May 16, 2009

Commonwealth Club of California: Torture Touches Everybody#links

Commonwealth Club of California: Torture Touches Everybody#links

This erudite review of the "moral hazards" of the Bush administration, as well as what is now expected from President Obama - and how he's already failing to demonstrate his commitment to the rhetoric that helped to get him elected - was one of the best hours I spent in at least the last week.

Will illegal actions be tolerated at the highest levels of government?

Will this administration turn its head and simply "look forward"?

If waterboarding was considered a crime...
....worth court-marshaling U.S. soldiers who did it to Filipino guerrillas
....the U.S. could sentence a Japanese army officer in 1947 to 15 years of hard labor to for waterboarding a U.S. citizen, and
....the U.S. military could court-marshal 2 soldiers for in 1965 after pictures of them waterboarding Vietcong were published,
then how is that waterboarding can be defended today by Cheney and his supporters?

And why is there hesitation by Obama to call for a vigorous investigation to uncover those guilty of authoring, authorizing, *and* committing such atrocities has not already begun?

What does it mean if the U.S. government has over 2000 - yes, two thousand - photographs that possibly depict torture authorized by the Bush administration?

Will this president bring real change to the way in which our government functions and how the office of the president affects our values and ethics, and will it be enough to make a real difference?

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