5/15/09

That Is It, I Have Had it With Obama
By: Mark W Adams


... critics who think I am (or should be) pissed off because I don't get to see more torture porn (which I can ... Now with more blood!).

Follow this logic, please.  If (as the right and now President Obama believe) releasing more torture porn pictures from abu-Ghraib will both demoralize our troops and inflame the muslm world -- then the behavior the pictures document should not have been conducted. 

Whatever you call it (I call it torture) it shouldn't have been done.  If releasing the pictures of the results of the Cheney Torture Regime will make us less safe, then the conduct of the CHENEY TORTURE REGIME MADE US LESS SAFE.

One thing these pictures prove, as did those released years ago combined with the Justice Department memos cataloging the hundreds of waterboarding incidents over a period of months, it that the "ticking time-bomb" scenario is utterly without merit.  They are evidence that torture became official policy, not merely reserved for a few key al-Qeada operatives, but the default and preferred interrogation technique for captives.

It seems to have been established that despite what this and the previous administration infer, it was not an isolated incident by a few bad-actors but a pervasive torture regime established and maintained by several diferent departments (CIA, Defense and Justice) under direction of the highest administration officials that took place in Cuba where the institutionalized barbarism originated, exported Afghanistan where dozens of deaths via torture occured have not been investigated/prosecuted, and then ended up happening in Iraq where we have more deaths by torture and these pictures turn up.

Torture is bad.  Any disagreement here?  Anyone ... Beuler?

For all the torture apologists like Liz Cheney and her father, suckit.  Notwithstanding your defenses/excuses that what we did was:
  1. Not torture,
  2. Required under the extreme circumstances immediately post 9/11 where it was feared that another attack was imminent (despite it taking months of sleep deprivation and "softening up" detainees before employing the waterboard for another couple of months),
  3. Worked despite clear evidence that it did not.
All the chickenhawks seem to agree that it's dangerous to release more torture porn pictures.  That's why allegedly free and open scocieties don't engage in such activities.

The photos are bad because of what they show.  We had no business doing what they show.  If what we did was defensible, understandable, legal, then the die-hard neo-cons shouldn't object to the world viewing these justifiable and ostensibly innocent acts.  It just doesn't pass the sniff-test.

Again I believe the President is playing 11th dimentional chess while the boobs on the right are playing checkers.  He now has political cover when the courts decide (as they already have done) to release the inflamatory photos, yet he is not personally responsible for inflaming the world as the situation in Afghanistan and and Pakistan are about to turn ugly enough ... and they are.  He's got enough trouble.

This decision to stall their release doesn't undermine his promise of transparency.  We know about the photos, we know what was authorized by whom, and we have courts and investigations proceeding whether or not we see more torture porn.  If he tried to shut those down, then I'd have problems.


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