Thursday, January 21, 2010

Torture and Murder at Gitmo: A Risky Political Opportunity If Obama Is Willing to Take It

He's gonna put the Repugs, conservatives, neocons, teabaggers, birthers, deathers, tenthers, racists, the religious right, staff and management of ClusterF**Noise, and general all 'round no good batcrap crazy wingnut fringies in Gitmo and give 'em what's comin' to 'em? Fuckin' A, Barry!

Sadly, no.

The Rude Pundit has said it before, and he'll keep saying it: the Obama administration's failure to investigate and prosecute the crimes of the Bush administration will lead to its downfall. You wanna establish moral authority to "change the tone" in Washington? Then adhere to some goddamned moral code. The laws of the land are a good place to start. As so many members of yer progressive punditry are saying, Barack Obama has to make Bush and the Republicans own the crises we are now in. And one way to do that is to reveal the extent that the United States under Bush tortured innocent people. It's ugly, and it's awful, but, hell, most violent crimes are.

You'll have to go see the next paragraph for yourself. It made my typing finger blush. Here's what it was able to c&p for you:

{...} "Enough, you sick fuck." At some point, it just becomes too ugly to bear.

When it comes to torturing brown people from somewhere filled with rocks and/or sand, it seems like Americans have a capacity to not give a shit. Yeah, bring on the kneecapping and electrodes on nipples. But maybe there is a line. Scott Horton's new report about the potential murder and cover-up of three detainees - Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, who was 17 when he was sold to the United States - would seem to be the limits. Three men, none charged with any crime, two of whom were on a list to be released, may have tortured and murdered by the CIA at a secret site at Gitmo nicknamed "Camp No," where, one imagines, the detainees weren't served chicken and rice while being allowed to read the Koran.

To be crassly political where lives are at stake, Obama has nothing to lose at this point by using the Gitmo murder cover-up as a way to keep the memory of the Bush administrations failures alive. It will galvanize the Democratic base, who want Republican blood spilled, and it will change the story in the press. Dahlia Lithwick asks in Slate, "Why aren't we talking about new accusations of murder at Gitmo?" And the answer is that the administration has locked itself into this bullshit notion of working across the aisle. Instead, the White House should be thinking about how to sell the public on the good of putting Dick Cheney on trial. Fuck, use Republican reasoning for impeaching Bill Clinton for a less-than-violent crime: he broke the law. Sadly, though, by getting George W. Bush involved in the Haiti recovery effort, it almost seems like Obama pities the man when he should be despised and exiled.

The Rude Pundit's father was a tragically hopeless Mets fan in the 1960s and 1970s. He said that he always bet against the team because, if they won, he'd be thrilled. And if they lost, at least he won the bet. At the end of the day, even if it does nothing to change the seeming tidal shift in public opinion on Obama, at least a few murderers and their enablers may go to prison. At least we can say that laws matter.

I guess we've got a theme today: advice for Obama. It's coming in a tsunami. It's been building little by little as he gave away the store to the banks, caved on health care to give the Repugs and their health cartel masters nearly everything they wanted and the bill looks like it may not pass anyway (and probably shouldn't as it stands), but since the MA flusterpluck it's crashing on the shore and may proceed inland in depth, scope, and time. I hope he hears it. And acts on it.

Matters of law aside, my fervent wish to exact vengeance - pure unadulterated lust for revenge - on Cheney and his bitch Bush who got us into all this remains unabated.

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