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