Those torture memos

I continue to rejoice every day that Barack Obama is our president. But I've been worried lately about his take on the insidious powerbrokers who made us a torturing country.

Obama has spoken of not prosecuting those who were taking orders from on high. But nobody should turn down the volume on the echoes of Nuremberg, where Hitler's accomplices were not allowed to get away with claiming they were "only following orders." (Nuremberg Principle IV: The "defense of superior orders" is not a defense for war crimes.)

Then there are the ones who prepared the orders. Two of them are Bush-Cheney Justice Department lawyers Jay Bybee (now a federal appeals court judge for life, though ripe for impeachment). and John Yoo (now a law professor.) They are prominent in the outrageous CIA torture memos that (fortunately) were released by the president.

What the memos describe in creepy detail is clearly torture. It includes:

* keeping prisoners in stress positions and small boxes
* walling (which means repeatedly hurling prisoners against a specially-made wall)
* week-long sleep deprivation
* waterboarding (with a CIA doctor standing by ready to do an emergency tracheotomy)
* note: two prisoners were waterboarded up to 266 times.

Waterboarding is not new. It was used in the Spanish Inquisition and by both the Gestapo and Japanese soldiers in World War II.

This torture disaster was all about the trashing of basic moral law, international law and US law. Prosecution of the whole torture team is about the future, since you cannot have a nation of laws if the guardians of those laws do not believe in them.

Even as the president spoke earlier against prosecution, he seemed to leave a window open. Yesterday he made it clear that the ball is in the hands of Attorney General Eric Holder and his Justice Department team. That is right where our legal system places the responsibility. Holder can get the ball rolling, so that the world of today and the history books of tomorrow will not be able to say that the Bush-Cheney cabal got away with their war crimes.

P.S. You can read the torture memos here:
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/olc_memos.html

Haters on the loose

Yesterday was the great Tea Bag Day so gleefully promoted by the Fox machine and lots of Republicans unhinged by Barack Obama's election (like Rick Perry, the apparently pro-secessionist governor of Texas.) Last night, when I reran Rachel Maddow's MSNBC report on this confusing, semi-national fandango, I used my computer's pause button over and over to jot down messages that tea bag participants were carrying or wearing. Here are some of those messages:

"Obama's a shoeshine boy"

(On a large photo of the president with an added mustache) "Barack H. Obama, the new face of Hitler"

"The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's ovens"

"Hey Big Bro, show us your real birth certificate"

"Stand idly by while some Kenyan tries to destroy America"

"Chairman Maobama"

(With a list of eight Dem members of Congress plus Hillary Clinton) "Hang 'em high"

"Speak for yourself, Obama. We are a Christian nation."

"Obama = Hitler"

No further comment. Oh wait--TEA is supposed to mean "Taxed Enough Already." But Obama wants to give 120 million families the biggest middle-class tax cut ever ($120 billion) and eliminate corporate tax havens in the Caribbean and beyond (where they store trillions of tax-free dollars,) So that just leaves the racist stuff. Now just pass the Tums please.

The story gets even worse

Somebody leaked a confidential, 43-page Red Cross report from 2007, so now we know that even medics, including physicians, took part in CIA torture sessions at so-called "black prisons." Sometimes the medics recommended that the torture be stopped, sometimes that it continue.

Remember when George W. Bush said our country did not torture? I'm sure that he (and Grand Inquisitor Cheney) would still say that the practices listed in the report are not really torture. They include:

* waterboarding
* being chained above the head naked for up to three days
* being swung against the wall by a neck collar
* being shackled and kept naked for weeks or months, sometimes having "to urinate and defecate on themselves and remain standing in their own bodily fluids for periods of several days."

Even as the world applauds the fact that President Obama has ordered these torture sites closed and ordered the CIA to follow the military's strict rules of interrogation, we have to ask:

When will the criminal indictments be issued? As my bumper sticker says, George W. Bush deserves a fair trial.