So we think if we ignore Bush's war crimes, sweep them under the rug, and just "turn the page" without reading it, that the sordid history of the last 8 years under the Bush "Fuhrer Doctrine" will suddenly just re-write itself and go away. Just like it never happened, like it all was just a bad movie-or dream. Right? Wrong. Well, America, welcome to reality. If we Americans don't do our jobs and prosecute these war criminals, the rest of the civilized world will. If we don't clean our own house, the world will. It's already beginning. From the Guardian UK's The Observer, this morning: "Spanish judge accuses six top Bush officials of torture"!
"Criminal proceedings have begun in Spain against six senior officials in the Bush administration for the use of torture against detainees in Guantánamo Bay. Baltasar Garzón, the counter-terrorism judge whose prosecution of General Augusto Pinochet led to his arrest in Britain in 1998, has referred the case to the chief prosecutor before deciding whether to proceed".
More under the fold...
This is rich-and refreshing, that somebody stands for, and believes in the rule of law. Apparently , America--you know the very same ones who authored the Nuremberg & Tokyo Protocols, making torture prosecutorial war crimes and condemning all those who performed such acts of barbarism to the gallows way back when we were the "good guys who always wore white hats"?-- has become a nation of torturers by extension. By not holding our leaders accountable to the rule of law, we have, in effect, placed our collective stamp of approval on the illegal use of torture. Torture is a war crime!
Do these people sound familiar to anyone? They should. They were the point men in Bush's march to those torture memos "legalizing" torture, who set the legal wheels in motion, giving "little boots", all the legal cover he needed to send countless human beings to the waterboarding rooms:
From The Observer:
"The officials named in the case include the most senior legal minds in the Bush administration. They are: Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff; Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defence; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon's general counsel; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who were both senior justice department legal advisers".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
What has our own new president to say about what I like to call the Bush "Caligula years"?
"Obviously we're going to be looking at past practices, and I don't believe that anybody is above the law," Obama said in January. "But my orientation's going to be to move forward."
"Obviously", and evidently, somebody was and still is "above the law". If we don't do our job, if we don't hold war crimes hearings(not just feeble attempts at looking for ways to "smooth everything over"), hold real investigations-and prosecute everyone who gave the orders to torture, from the top-down, the rest of the world can and will.