Which is pretty much the line being barfed out by the Defenders of the Torture State.
Not only did officials of the United State commit war crimes with the approval of the President, now we're going to try and sweep it under the rug?
It should also be noted that the Coverup Crowd includes people who are culpable.
So, what are we going to do? Are we going to hide this report away for fifty or seventy-five years, until 99% of everyone reading this post today is dead, and then release it and say "we're sorry that our ancestors were terrible people"?
There is a word for that: Cowardice.
This nation committed crimes. One of the first steps in getting past doing wrong is admitting to the crime and accepting that what was done was wrong.
One doesn't have to have a law degree to know that torture is illegal. The assurances of the pro-torture crowd (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Addington, Bybee, Yoo, Hayden and others) to the torturers that what they were doing was legal should not have passed the smell test. Even the FBI, an organization known for holding itself above the law, wouldn't partake of torture at Guantanamo (though they have no problem with torture by proxy).
We did this. As some of the commenters have noted, everybody knows already. Let's sack up and deal with it.
UPDATE: And we may not have a choice.
A blog by a "sucker" and a "loser" who served her country in the Navy.
If you're one of the Covidiots who believe that COVID-19 is "just the flu",
that the 2020 election was stolen, or
especially if you supported the 1/6/21 insurrection,
leave now.
Slava Ukraini!
Monday, December 8, 2014
2 comments:
House Rules #1, #2 and #6 apply to all comments. Rule #3 also applies to political comments.
In short, don't be a jackass. THIS MEANS YOU!
If you never see your comments posted, see Rule #7.
All comments must be on point and address either the points raised in the blog post or points raised by commenters in response.
Any comments that drift off onto other topics are subject to deletion.
(Please don't feed the trolls.)
中國詞不評論，冒抹除的風險。僅英語。
COMMENT MODERATION IS IN EFFECT UFN. This means that if you are an insulting dick, nobody will ever see it.
It's the old issue of 'plausible deniability'. As long as the report's not made public, those guilty of these atrocities can always argue that they worked 'within the law' (such as it was). They can (and will) blame any 'errors' or 'excesses' upon 'rogue subordinates' who 'exceeded their authority' or 'acted outside the law'. They'll throw them to the wolves in an attempt to save themselves.
ReplyDeleteIf this report is made public, it'll prove they knew what was going on and they won't be able to evade responsibility any longer. Ergo, I don't expect it to be made public - at least, not without being 'sanitized'.
I'm with you, though. We did this, and we need to 'fess up and punish those responsible. If we don't, we're no better than any other pariah power that did the same.
The question is, who are we keeping this secret from? This is as ridiculous as the "secret" bombing of Cambodia in 1969-1973, it was certainly no secret to the Cambodians, it wasn't as if someone else's B-52's were dropping bombs on them! Same deal here. The people we tortured know we damn well tortured them. Their relatives -- half of the Middle East -- damn well know we tortured those people, most of whom were guilty of nothing other than being brown and in the wrong place at the wrong time. Releasing this report isn't going to tell any terrorist in the Middle East anything he doesn't already know, which is that the United States tortured a shitload of people and thus has no moral leg to stand on when it criticizes others for torture.
ReplyDeleteSo the question is, who are we hiding this report from? Not the terrorists, they already know everything in it because they already debriefed the poor sods we released after finding out they were innocent. Not the people of the Middle East, they already know everything in it direct from the horses mouth, the mouths of the people we tortured. Who are we hiding this report from?
Who was Nixon hiding his bombing of Cambodia from, again?
- Badtux the Snarky History Penguin