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Professor Jonathan Turley on the Rachel Maddow Show, regarding investigating and prosecuting war crimes committed by the Bush-Cheney administration:
It’s going to be inconvenient. But principle is always inconvenient. It’s never a good time for principle.
And so that’s going to be the test. But you know what, I think the new Barack Obama, the President Obama is going to find it very hard to go ’round the world and to say that we’re now, again, the nation of rules of law, if the first act he commits as President is to walk away from a confirmed war crime.
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In a few hours, Barack Obama will solemnly swear to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” whose Article II will require him to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and whose Article VI makes Senate-ratified treaties “supreme law of the land” binding on “the judges in every state.” One such treaty is the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which requires its parties in whose territory a torturer is found to apprehend him and prosecute or extradite him, “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever.”
Yes!
There don’t seem to be any last minute blanket pardons…anybody??? It almost looks as if Bush only commuted the sentences of those two border patrol agents. Does he still have time?
he only cares about himself?
(file under idle thots about not much)
Turley is really really strong and vocal about this. And as always, he makes a lot of sense. I’d stay tuned. We may not have heard the last of it after all….
Mr President,
I and my family congratuate you and offer our prayers and good wishes. We pray for justice. We pray for accountability. We pray that those who ciminally violated our constitution and our laws are brought before the bar of justice.
Most of all Mr. President, we pray for the return to the American principal that no one is above the law. That the nation returns to the value that every person who serves the public must account for their service and be judged criminal or hero.
Your administration will choose. Will you ignore the criminal behavior of the last administration and thereby assume the guilt of torture, spying, subverting the constitution and ignoring the law? Or, will you stand up and clean the Stables fouled by Bush and his menions so that the nation can again claim to believe in and uphold justice?
Again I pray that you will lead and reaffirm American civil liberties and recreate the American Way of life.
“Judicially speaking, the United States has a clear obligation” to bring proceedings against Bush and Rumsfeld, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak said, in remarks to be broadcast on Germany’s ZDF television Tuesday evening.
He noted Washington had ratified the UN convention on torture which required “all means, particularly penal law” to be used to bring proceedings against those violating it.
“We have all these documents that are now publicly available that prove that these methods of interrogation were intentionally ordered by Rumsfeld,” against detainees at the US prison facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Nowak said.
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/B…..02009.html